A Corpus-driven Study On AT Collocational Behavior Of Chinese College Non-English-Major EFL Learners

One of the main developments in the field of ELT in recent years has been a growing awareness of the importance of collocation. Students and English teachers have realized that incompetence in using of collocation affects natural expression of English.At present, most research on collocation focuses on substantives like nouns and verbs. Words like prepositions have not gained enough attention. There is even less research on the collocation of AT.With the evidence obtained from corpora and by adopting approaches of contrastive interlanguage analysis and error analysis, this study aimed at exploring the characteristics of AT collocational behavior of Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners. The study found out: AT collocates used by Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners on the whole are not significantly different from those used by native speakers in terms of variety. However, judging from the grammatical and lexical perspectives, the AT collocates used by Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners display a dramatic difference from those used by native speakers. When comparing AT collocations used by Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners with those used by native speakers with reference to "Reference Phrase List of College English Curriculum Requirements" in the College English Curriculum Requirements, Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners' AT collocational behavior shows the following characteristics: In terms of accuracy, Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners tend to misuse some AT collocations such as at first, at last, at the same time; in terms of typicality and variety, they tend to underuse and unuse some typical AT collocations such as at least, at one time, at sb. 's disposal. This study also yielded some other AT collocations used by Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners, such as At the beginning (of), arrive at, good at, stare at and has made analysis of them.One striking finding of this study is that only 2% of the AT collocations listed in the "Reference Phrase List of College English Curriculum Requirements" is properly used while the other 98% is overused, misused or underused, even unused, which means that Chinese college non-English-major EFL learners are not competent in using AT collocations. This finding has some implication for the future college English teaching.