An Analysis Of Chinese EFL Learners' Adjective-Noun Collocational Errors

Collocation and error analysis have both been hot issues in linguistic research. However, there is scarcity in the literature of collocational error analysis. While collocational errors have been recognized as an important part of Chinese EFL learners' errors, not much attention has been paid to adjective-noun collocational errors. In fact, Chinese EFL learners exhibit a particular weakness in using adjective-noun collocations.Based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and British National Corpus (BNC), adopting the theory of error analysis, and with the assistance of concordance tools and SPSS, the present study conducts a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis of Chinese EFL learners' adjective-noun collocational errors, with the purpose of finding out the general characteristics of these errors, the developmental trend in regard to learners' proficiency level, the most frequently misused adjectives, the unique feature of Chinese EFL learners' adjective-noun collocations in comparison with English native speakers, and therefore seeking the underlying sources of these adjective-noun collocational errors.Results show that Chinese EFL learners committed far more adjective-noun collocational errors in the semantic sense than in the syntactic sense, and they inclined to substitute an adjective with its assumed synonym, producing unconventional adjective-noun collocations. College non-English majors were found to commit significantly more adjective-noun collocational errors than high school learners and college English majors. The frequently misused adjectives were mostly high-frequency words, which learners are supposed to be familiar with. The study of individual word reveals there was little overlap between collocates used by Chinese learners and by English native speakers. The inducing factors of these errors could be traced to interlingual factors, intralingual factors and communication strategies.These results indicate that more efforts are needed in raising learners' awareness of collocational restrictions and reducing the negative transfer from learners' mother tongue. It is hoped that the findings will shed some light on EFL teaching and learning.