| This thesis is intended to observe the features of Chinese college EFL learners' use of adjective-noun collocations. It uses learner corpora as research database, and native speaker corpora as reference database. In this study, nine nouns with relatively higher frequencies in leaner corpora are singled out to retrieve adjective-noun collocations in both learner and native speaker corpora. Based on a detailed research and analysis of these collocation instances, the study arrives at a conclusion about the features of the Chinese college EFL learners' use of adjective-noun collocations, and the underlying reasons for the phenomena are also explored.The research results show that Chinese EFL learners have the following features in terms of using adjective-noun collocations:(1) The learners are inclined to produce semantically similar L2 collocations based on the use of their native language, e.g., book knowledge and high education etc.;(2) compared with the native speakers, they tend to both over-modify some nouns like day with much more diverse adjectives and under-modify some nouns like society with relatively limited collocates;(3) they have obvious bias on some versatile adjectives like big and good that can be used to collocate with nouns at large, even if such combination is not typical in native speakers' production; and(4) it often happens to the learners that they focus their attention on certain adjectives to collocate with certain nouns, e.g., the adjective long for time and modern for society.The analysis of the research results indicates that L1 transfer and cultural factors are the main causes for the deviations of the adjective-noun collocations used by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. Some pedagogic implications thus can be put forward for the college EFL teachers to help learners understand the use of set collocations in their vocabulary learning and to pay more attention to the collocations whose translation is vulnerable to L1 influence on the learners.
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