A Corpus-Based Study Of Verb/Noun Collocational Errors In English Writings By Chinese Students

This descriptive study is designed to explore the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners'verb/noun collocational errors based on CLEC, to investigate the verbs and nouns that cause most problems to the learners'verb/noun collocations, and to attempt to provide some tentative explanations for these errors. A total of 1,566 verb/noun collocational errors in CLEC are examined and descriptive classification of these errors is made by adopting a combined taxonomy which divides these errors into 14 subcategories, followed by a diagnosis-based classification into 13 subcategories. The number of each subcategory of verb/noun collocational errors is counted and normalized. Analyses are carried out in relation to the learners'L2 proficiency and writing condition differences. Comparison is employed as the principal method of data analysis and the data of both descriptive and diagnosis-based categorizations are first analyzed with regard to L2 proficiency differences, followed by the analysis of the data with regard to writing condition differences. After that, closer examinations on the wrongly used verbs and nouns in the learners'verb/noun collocations are conducted. Through analyzing the results, this thesis has the following findings:1) No specific pattern emerges in Chinese EFL learners'verb/noun collocational errors. However, all learners show a heavy reliance on their mother tongue.2) Learners'verb/noun collocational errors display different characteristics with regard to their L2 proficiency differences. The result of ST2, ST5 and ST6 learners'verb/noun collocational errors turns out to be somewhat surprising: most subcategories of these errors in ST6 outnumber those in ST5 and some even outnumber those in ST2. In ST3 and ST4, however, the number of each subtype of these errors is negatively correlated with the learners'L2 proficiency levels in most cases.3) Different characteristics of learners'verb/noun collocational errors arise due to the writing condition differences. The result of both descriptive and diagnosis-based classification shows that most subcategories in examination writing outnumber those in free writing. Learners in examination writing commit more Misanalysis, Incomplete/Misunderstanding of the Concept errors and tend to rely more heavily on their mother tongue.4) The verbs and nouns that cause most problems to Chinese EFL learners'verb/noun collocations are familiar to the learners and most of the wrongly used verbs and nouns in their verb/noun collocations are among the 3,000 most frequently used words.Based on the findings and conclusions, the study has the following implications for the language pedagogy:First, learners'awareness of collocations should be raised. The idiom-principle should be emphasized. That is to say, learners should be made aware that the co-occurrence of certain verb and noun is a natural trend in a language and they should be encouraged to learn a word with its habitual companies.Second, quantities of authentic verb/noun collocations need to be provided as input by teachers as well as students themselves. Newspapers or magazines published by the presses that take the target language as the native language and collocation dictionaries should be introduced to learners.Third, teaching and learning verb/noun collocations in English can be undertaken with the reference to those in Chinese. Those verb/noun collocations that are different in Chinese and English should be paid more attention to and teachers should contrast English verb/noun collocations with possible Chinese equivalents so as to raise learners'consciousness of avoiding L1 interference.Finally, applying corpora would be a potentially effective way of language teaching and learning. Teachers can collect typical collocations with the help of corpus and concordance. Meanwhile native English speakers'corpus should be recommended to learners, too.