Study On Prefabricated Chunks In Vocational College Students' Practical English Writing

The study on prefabricated chunks has attracted the attention of researchers in the linguistic field since the beginning of last century. Prefabricated chunks are some ready-made multi-word combinations in the language. For the prefabricated chunks, various researchers have given different definitions and classifications from different angles. In this paper they are defined as "with a relative high frequency in use, they are prefabricated multi-words units which have recognizable structures, relatively fixed meanings and permit different degrees of abstraction." Colligations are the abstract grammatical patterns of words and collocations are the concrete lexical patterns of words. They are all contained in the prefabricated chunks only differ on the degrees of abstraction. English practical writing is required for vocational college students to master during the school, while in students' writings there are many kinds of problems. As one of significant problems, some words" colligation and collocation problems will influence the accuracy and fluency of the whole writing. So in this thesis, the author will focus on problems of these two aspects of prefabricated chunks:colligation and collocation appeared in students'practical writing. First, all the collocation errors appeared in students'practical writing will be found out, and analysis of subtypes will be made, and then author will focus on studies of several English verbs frequently used in students'practical writing from two aspects:colligation and collocation.The purposes of this research are:1) to find out different types of collocation errors in students'practical writing, calculate what kind of collocation errors would show higher percentage than others and analyze causes of these errors.2) to explore how the vocational college students'use of some common verbs frequently appeared in the collected writing, to see if their colligation and collocation behaviors vary from or conform with those of the native speakers', and the fundamental causes of these differences and similarities. For these purposes, about 300 business letters of five types from vocational college students are collected as a small corpus. As for the study of words colligation and collocation behaviors, 5 frequently used verbs in students'practical writing are chosen, and at the same time there are 200 corresponding authentic examples of each verb in the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary are gathered to have a comparison with the former chosen ones. Comparing with the examples of native speakers' use of these verbs, one can study not only the misuses but also the overuses and underuses of the colligation and collocation behaviors of some verbs in the writing. From the analysis, it can be concluded that on the one hand, in students' practical writing, lexical errors show a much higher percentage than grammatical errors and in the subtypes of collocation errors, when it is analyzed from the word class, different word classes would show different percentages significantly. The collocation errors involving noun and verb, verb and preposition show high percentage than other types. On the other hand, the vocational college students'behaviors on colligation and collocation of these 5 words show a great difference from those of the native speakers.Through comparison, it is easily to find that students'colligation and collocation behaviors are greatly influenced by their mother tongue or target language. When a verb is misused in a certain colligation, it may be attributed to the mother tongue's negative transfer, or students'partial knowledge about the target language. The reason why a verb is overused in a certain colligation is that some English words have similar uses of colligations with their Chinese counterpart, or maybe our students are so familiar with such colligation and have kept them in their minds. The underuse of certain colligations is to a large distance due to the relative unfamiliarity of this use. While some collocation problems, to a great extent, are influenced by their mother tongue.This research is only a tentative study on the different collocations and some representatively verb-centered colligations and collocations behaviors in vocational college students'practical writing. There are some limitations, so some further researches in this field are needed in the future study.