| Collocation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in language because of the density of its occurrence and is becoming an increasingly important field in language teaching. However, few methodical studies have been made as regards the learners'collocational behaviors. The present thesis attempts to make an analysis of Chinese learners'use of noun-noun collocation by comparing the noun-noun collocational patterns of Chinese learners with those of native speakers. On the basis of evidence from a learner corpus (CLEC) and a reference corpus (BNC), this research aims at generalizing the representative features of noun-noun collocation as displayed in Chinese learners'writings.The present thesis adopts the concordance software WordSmith and SARA to collect the concordances and collocational information in which the nodes are. Besides, the statistical methods of Z-score and MI-value were employed to measure the significance of the co-occurrence of collocates. This research focuses on the significant collocates. The higher the Z-score and MI-value are, the more significant the node and its collocates; when the figures research a certain point, the collocates are treated as significant. In the present study, the cases whose Z≥2 and MI≥3 are treated as significant collocates. The present research bases on the following steps: Step one, selecting the particular nodes. The selection is largely based on two criteria: the frequency list generated by WordSmith of the corpus of CLEC; the tagging scheme designed by the Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of Guangdong Foreign Studies University to identify the errors in CLEC. CC1 in CLEC stands for improper noun (phrase) and noun (phrase) combination or semantic. According to the above criteria, the following eight nouns are selected as node words for investigation: water, time, job, life, society, study, country and commodities. Step two: After the selection of node words, the collocational behavior of each node is investigated to reveal the Chinese learners'characteristics of using noun-noun collocations. Step three: the features of each node in BNC are investigated. Step four, results and discussion. After the collection of the data, different characteristics of using noun-noun collocation both in CLEC and BNC are compared, and the problems that Chinese learners should pay attention to are listed.The research findings show that there lies a great discrepancy between Chinese learners'use of noun-noun collocation and the conventional use by native speakers. Compared with native speakers, the number of noun-noun collocations used by Chinese learners is much smaller, and the collocates in those collocations are highly repeated and lack variety as well; the noun-noun collocations which are frequently used by Chinese learners are not always used by native speakers, some of which are even not used by native speakers; for the classification of nouns in composing noun-noun collocations, concrete nouns are overused by Chinese learners, whereas abstract nouns are underused by Chinese learners. The findings obtained from the investigation suggest that there is still much to be done to improve the learners'collocational competence.
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