An Empirical Study On The Competence Of Adjective-Noun Collocations By Non-English Majors

Collocation is one of language aspects, which is generally considered arbitrary by nature and problematic to EFL learners who require collocational competence for effective communication. Therefore this empirical study attempts to examine the competence of adjective-noun collocations by investigating how 60 non-English major college students acquire the three kinds of adjective-noun collocations including synonymous, polysemous and deverbal participial adjective-noun collocation from the perspective of receptive and productive mastery. By analyzing the data in descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, the following conclusions can be drawn:Firstly, as far as the performances of freshmen and juniors are concerned, based on the descriptive statistics, the mean score for total adjective-noun collocation of freshmen is lower than that of juniors and through independent-sample T test, it was discovered that there indeed exist some differences between them and the differences are significant. That is, juniors do significantly better than freshmen.Secondly, as far as differences between productive and receptive adjective-noun collocations are concerned, there indeed exists a gap between subjects'receptive and productive mastery of the three types of adjective-noun collocations. In other words, productive competence of EFL learners is worse than receptive competence. Such a gap exists not only between freshmen and juniors but also within them and it suggests that the development from receptive mastery to productive mastery is a slow process.Therefore, some pedagogical suggestions are provided for the learning and teaching of collocation so as to raise learners'awareness of collocations and increase EFL learners'collocational competence.The present thesis falls into six chapters. Chapter 1 gives an introduction. It consists of research background, research orientation and the layout of the thesis. Chapter 2 is literature review. It reviews some theoretical foundation and previous researches on collocation. Firstly the studies on vocabulary knowledge are discussed. Secondly, it presents the definition of collocation and collocational continuum. Thirdly, the theory on English adjective-noun collocation is reviewed. Finally, the previous studies on the competence of adjective-noun collocations are observed. Chapter 3 builds up the conceptual framework for the present study, which includes theoretical basis, the definition of collocation and the collocation type in this present study. Chapter 4 describes the research methodology, which consists of research questions and hypotheses, variables, subjects, instruments, procedures, scoring of the tests as well as validity and reliability of the test. Chapter 5 provides the quantitative as well as qualitative results of the present study and then summarizes the major findings. Chapter 6 is the conclusions which are drawn from these findings as well as the implications and limitations, in which some pedagogical implications are presented and the limitations of the present study are also reported.