A Corpus-based Study On Collocational Competence Of Senior English Majors

Collocation has been discussed heatedly in modern linguistics, especially inapplied linguistics. Firth was the first linguist to put forward and discuss collocation as alinguistic term formally. Collocation is defined as the joint usage of specific and realwords. Jimmie Hill used to describe collocational competence in an indirect way. Hethought that collocational competence means the ability to understand and outputchunks quickly in the process of language coding and decoding. Hill also claims thatmost learners have a certain command of vocabulary but the fluent use of language isinadequate owing to the limited competence of collocation. Vocabulary teaching shouldfocus on their ability to use those collocations they have learnt properly. Apart fromcommunicative competence to use language, the students should also have thecollocational competence, which means the ability to choose and use the typical wordcombinations.Vocabulary is a basic and important part of English learning. College students havegrasped some new words but cannot use collocations in a right way. Modern technologyof corpus and computer has developed fast to promote the study on collocations. Basedon the theory of collocation, the present study analyzes the collocational competence ofadvanced English learners with the help of corpora and some software. All the90compositions, written by senior English majors, are taken from the Spoken and WrittenEnglish Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0(SWECCL2.0). Classified analyses are madeaccording to different types of collocations, namely grammatical collocation, lexicalcollocation, fixed collocation and creative collocation. Their frequencies and ratios oferrors are calculated and then classified into different kinds. In the next step, the wordsociety, which is most frequently misused by students, was studied respectively in bothSWECCL2.0with AntConc and in Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA). Its MI-scores in both corpora are retrieved to compare the different usagesbetween Chinese learners and native speakers.The major findings of the research are as follows:1. Students used more lexical collocations but committed fewer errors thangrammatical collocations on average. It is more difficult for second language learners tofollow the usage of grammatical collocations.2. Students tend to use more fixed collocations to express their points of view but they will turn to some inappropriate creative collocations when there is no properexpression.3. The usages of society vary a lot between Chinese advanced English learnersand native speakers.The possible causes of the errors are analyzed based on the classifications ofdifferent collocations and types of incorrect collocations. Firstly, language transfer hasgreat impact on their usage of vocabulary. They are apt to use English with their owncreations and styles. Some of them even translate Chinese expressions literally intoEnglish without considering the native usages of words. Secondly, they are ignorant ofsome collocation restrictions or some habitual collocations. In other words, they paylittle attention to distinguishing the collocational tendencies of some synonyms so theyuse collocations disorderly. Thirdly, some collocations are generated in a wrong way bythe students. They use some words to collocate with possible words or phrases andignore the generating limitation of words. Last but not least, students use some words orphrases redundantly. They repeatedly misuse some similar collocations.The above mentioned findings and discussion have some implications forcollocation teaching and learning. In the first place, there should be enough amount ofcollocation input for students. The collocations should be taught as units instead ofsingle words. In the second place, learners should put together collocation input andoutput. More exercises are suggested to find out the improper usages of collocations andto provide corrections in time for the purpose of correct and native-like Englishexpressions. Lastly, teachers should try to change the traditional grammar-focusedvocabulary teaching methods. On the contrary, contemporary technology of corpus isrecommended to provide learners with a large number of native expressions and tointegrate them into authentic language environment. Moreover, teachers can also buildlearner-corpus by collecting the typical collocation errors and give them corrections intime so as to improve their ability to use collocations.