Analysis On Collocation Errors In College Students' English Writings

It is widely acknowledged that collocations are an important part of English learners'language competence and appropriate collocations will not only help learners express themselves more accurately, but also more fluently. Influenced by traditional English vocabulary teaching, teachers tend to put emphasis on the explanation of single words, while overlook the teaching of collocation. As a result, students have almost no idea of collocation, let alone its restrictions. It is inevitable that they make collocation errors during their output of English such as writing. To improve the quality of students'English output and furthermore their English communicative ability, it is especially important for teachers to change traditional way of teaching and put more emphasis on the teaching of collocation.In order to find out the most common types of collocation errors in students'writings, analyze their causes, and give advice to the practical teaching, the author has selected the freshmen of 2008 Japanese major in BUPT (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) to do relative experiments. During the autumn semester of 2008-2009, all of the 24 students were required to hand in four compositions of no less than 150 words with given topics.96 compositions were collected all together. Then, according to the collocation theories of famous linguist Morton Benson and Error Analysis theories of Pit Corder, the author collected, recorded, classified and finally analyzed collocation errors identified in the research materials.It is found that students make far more errors in grammatical collocation than in lexical collocation. Among grammatical collocation errors, those related with preposition occupy 50%, which show preposition is really one of the difficulties in students'collocation learning. However, the most problematic aspect of lexical collocation lies in collocation between verbs and nouns. That's because students need to use lots of phrases constructed by verbs and nouns, but their acquisition of these collocations is not satisfactory.Furthermore, this study explores the possible causes of collocation errors, and four reasons are presented. Negative transfer from native language and target language, induced factors such as teachers, dictionaries, etc, and inappropriate communication strategies are all sources of collocation errors.At last, suggestions for collocation teaching are put forward by the author. Firstly, students'awareness of collocation should be raised. Secondly, both collocation input and output ought to be increased. Thirdly, collocations need to be taught when vocabulary is illustrated in classroom. Fourthly, teachers are suggested to compile problematic word lists for students, collecting common collocation errors made by students. Finally, it's also advisable for students to make their own collocation notebooks, so as to store useful collocations they are interested in.Of course there are some limitations in this study. For example, compared with comprehensive corpus, the 96 compositions collected is quite a small size without including all subtypes of collocation errors. Nevertheless, this study still sheds some light on collocation research and offers some constructive suggestions to English teachers. It's hoped that findings and implications of the study will benefit researchers and teachers in general.