Analysis Of Senior High School Students' Collocational Errors In English Composition

Although there is no consolidate definition of collocation until now, the importance of this term has drawn the attention of many researchers in China and abroad. Lots of articles, dissertations and monographs came into being. For English learners, choosing the right collocation will make English study much easier and improve the efficiency of learning EnglishHowever, in English teaching, teachers concentrate more on the paradigmatic sense relations of lexical items (relations of set of lexical items that belong to the same class and can be substituted for one another in specific grammatical and lexical contexts).Very little attention is paid to the syntagmatic aspect of lexis (ability of items to co-occur, otherwise known as collocation) (Taiwo,2004; Zahra,2010). Collocation is important for the achievement of native like competence, but for most Chinese learners who study English as a foreign language, collocation is difficult to learn. Based on the theory of error analysis, this thesis mainly discusses the problems of the collocational errors of the senior high school students. Farghl and Obiedat (1995) point out that one efficient way to raise the awareness of collocation is to focus on a selection of the target EFL learners'mis-collocations in their production of the language. Therefore, the study is conducted to find out the reasons and some useful ways in language study. Taking the senior high school students as the subject, the thesis collects the data from the students'writings and the questionnaire. The result of this study is that senior high school students make more errors in verb+noun than other kinds collocational errors. It has been discovered that many Chinese learners use collocational errors in verb+noun. The major cause of such errors could be attributed to the negative transfer of the mother tongue, the ignorance of the collocational restrictions and literal translation. The pedagogical implications are also presented in this paper, including cultivating learners'awareness of identifying typical collocations, stressing the real context and the restrictions of the common-used words, using the collocational dictionary etc. All the above mentioned implications will help them to learn and master the collocations effectively and further improve their writing ability.