A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis Of The High-frequency Verb Collocation In The Writings By The Chinese And American University Students

The inappropriate use of collocations in ESL (English as a secondlanguage) writing has long been troublesome in the ESL teaching process.It is often the case that ESL teachers could notice the inaccuracy ofcertain collocations by intuition but they could not testify their feelings.Modern technological reform and development of the corpus techniquehave earned chances for researching this problem. Quantitative analysisof a large number of texts provides persuasive evidence for intuitivesenses.The present study is based on two self-built corpora of the samekind of writings by the Chinese and American university students, whichmakes a more striking contrast between native and non-native speakers intheir use of English. The specific corpora data come from after-classwritings under the same writing topics accomplished by the sophomoresof different majors in Raymond Walters College of University ofCincinnati and the English-major sophomores from School of EnglishStudies in Xi’an International Studies University respectively. Throughthe statistical analysis of the verbs and verb collocations in the twocorpora, this study is designed to describe, explain and summarize thedifferentiation in the selection of verbs between the Chinese L2learnersand the native learners, and to figure out regulations in order to offerreferences for ESL teaching and learning.Various linguists have defined collocation in their own way. Thisstudy puts emphasis on reviewing a detailed classification of collocationproposed by Benson et al.(1986), based on which the following researchis conducted. The study first makes a list of the overall high-frequency verbs in the two corpora and then, on the basis of frequency parameters,conducts detailed comparative study of two verbs: make and think. Thecollocation research of the two verbs includes: different patterns of make,causative patterns of make, the make+noun pattern, the semanticdistribution of make, different patterns of think, the phrasal use of thinkand the typical pattern I think.The research results show that similarities and differences co-existin all collocation investigations. Under most circumstances there is nosignificant difference in the use of verb collocates between the native andnon-native speakers; however, the Chinese learners sometimes showparticular preference towards certain verb collocates such asmake+sb./sth.+adjective, I think, etc. Therefore, a qualitative analysis iscarried out after obtaining the quantitative data in order to deeply dissectthe reasons of occurrences of deviant or inappropriate collocates. Theanalysis mainly proceeds from three aspects: intralingual, interlingual,and teaching and learning factors. Based on the above analysis, this studycomes up with relevant suggestions for collocation teaching, that is,implications for compiling teaching materials, ESL teaching and learning.