Error Analysis On Verb-noun Collocation By English Majors

Although collocation has always been studied by linguists, the current situationcannot satisfy them that English teachers attach importance to the teaching of breadth ofvocabulary, not accentuating the depth of vocabulary which is vital for the achievementof the native-like competence. Further evidence also proved collocation, especiallyverb-noun collocation is a difficult point in teaching.Researchers has studied errors on verb-noun collocation mainly based on the corpusin the past20years. By contrast, the exploration of raw materials which are students’natural output is rather limited. Proceeding from this point, the author collected143pieces of writings of37sophomore English majors form Yan’an University lasting foralmost one year as the small corpus. Linguists Farghl and Obiedat presented that anefficacious method to improve the awareness of collocation is to emphasize learners’collocational errors in their free output. Consequently, based on contrastive analysis,error analysis, contrastive learner corpus analysis, language transfer theory, interlanguage theory, chunks, and dichotomy models of language (with the assistance ofthe software SPSS19.0), the author made a quantitative and qualitative analysis aimingto find the main types of errors on verb-noun collcoations, the relationship between theerrors of the verb-noun collocations committed by the learners and their overallproficiency levels, and the causes of these errors. Being more convinced, the authordesigned a questionnaire and interviewed20of the students.The author found9types of errors on verb-noun collocations including the wrongchoice of verbs, the wrong choice of nouns, combination existing but being not usedcorrectly, the misuse of both verb and noun, the misuse of the preposition (eitherconnected with verb or noun), the misuse of determiner, the misuse of number, and themisuse of the structure. The result shows there is negative correlational relationshipbetween the errors of the verb-noun collocations committed by the learners and theiroverall proficiency levels. It is also excavated there are13factors interfering withstudents’ acquiring, consisting of unfamiliarity with chunks and semantic prosody ofsome words, ignorance of the Chinese and English verbs’ diverse range of application,the transitivity and intransitivity in English, overgeneralization, ignorance of therestrictions of verb-noun collocation, failure of mastery of the systematic rules, falseconcept hypothesized by learners, literal translation, avoidance, simplification, anderrors induced by teachers and materials.With the assistance of the results of the study, the author proposes somepedagogical implications-raising the awareness of verb-noun collocation, increasinginput and output, making a comparison between Chinese and English verb-nouncollocation, and teaching students how to use dictionaries effectively. At last, the authorstates the limitations of this study to provide a more comprehensive way for furtherstudy.