A Corpus-based Study On The Uses Of Have By Chinese Non-english Learners

Vocabulary acquisition, especially the qualitative knowledge of high-frequency words are of crucial significance to language acquisition and language teaching. As a ubiquitous phenomenon in language use, collocation is the key to idiomatic expression. The proliferation of corpora provides an opportunity to study and describe language in ways that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from the descriptions that have previously been available. With the aid of computer learner corpora, the totality of the learner performance is expected to be better captured.The present research aims to explore the features of Chinese EFL learners'use of the high-frequent word HAVE on the basis of corpus data from the Chinese Learner English Corpus. With the method of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, the study is conducted to investigate Chinese learner's knowledge of HAVE across two proficiency levels:(1) college non-English majors (Band 4), (2) college non-English majors (Band 6). The reference corpus BAWE and BNC are employed as a baseline to evaluate Chinese learners'performance. The software AntConc is used to retrieve the information needed. MI-score is adopted to determine the significance of the co-occurrence between collocates. This study is intended to be an integration of both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The major findings yielded from the research are summarized as follows.First, in terms of overall frequency of HAVE, the Chinese non-English majors (Band 4) showed no difference, while Band 6 students displayed a strong over-use of HAVE, compared with British university students.Second, a significance difference lied between Chinese learners and natives in the uses of HAVE. The Chinese learners under-used of HAVE in perfect tense and subjunctive mood; while over used "HAVE'in "have+object " structure.Third, the frequencies of the top 10 and 20 noun collocates of HAVE in Chinese learners corpora were much higher than those in native corpus. The majority of noun collocates in native corpus were exclusive in Chinese learners corpora. Chinese learners display the feature of non-nativeness and the propensity to employ the early acquired words as collocates. Furthermore, there was significant difference in the top 20 noun collocates of HAVE by MI-score, and the noun collocates shared by native speaker and Chinese learners have also found to be significantly different in MI values.Finally, the results of error analysis indicated that for Chinese learners, their learning of English is somewhat influenced by Chinese system. Therefore, the elements that are structurally different in the learners'native language and target language are more difficult to learn and more likely to cause impediment. It is also found that transfer interacts with other factors such as language proficiency. Chinese learners also tend to adopt the strategies of overgeneralization and ignorance of the rules in their writings.In short, the present research describes the features of Chinese English learners'use of HAVE, and expected to provide helpful feedback to language teaching and learning. It is important to enlarge students'vocabulary as well as master qualitative knowledge of vocabulary. Corpora and concordance software are of great use in helping students in learning collocates.