An Investigation Into The Use Of Colligation In The Writing Of English Majors

After Firth (1957) put forward the concept of colligation, studies on colligations were undertaken later, which mainly focused on colligations of nouns and verbs and colligations of some specific words. Researches in China have been concentrated on such respects as research methods of colligations, the importance of colligations for English vocabulary teaching, the developmental features of colligations used by Chinese English learners and other contrastive analysis using data from different corpora. In summary, previous studies on colligations conducted abroad and in China mainly focused on a word class or a specific word, using data from different corpora, which lacked information about a specific group of English learners in the use of colligation. To the knowledge of the present author, there is a shortage of investigations on the use of colligations by English learners of different proficiency levels. Few studies, if any, were conducted to compare the use of colligations by different proficiency levels, and used English majors as the subjects of their research. Therefore, the objectives of this research are the followings:(1) to examine correlation between the number of correct colligations and the quality (as measured by the scores) of English major students’essays;(2) to detect whether there are any similarities and differences in the use of colligations between Grade2012and Grade2011English majors; and respective features in question;(3) to find out colligational errors committed by the two groups of English majors in their essays and analyze possible causes of the colligational errors.Based on the classification of colligations by Wei (2002), this paper makes a contrastive analysis of the colligations utilized by45English majors of Grade2012and45English majors of Grade2011of Beijing Forestry University in their essays, using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Quantitatively, data were collected and classified of colligations used in the students’essays (fourteen types in total), then Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to see the correlation between the number of using correct colligations and the quality of the students’essays, t-test were used to detect the significant difference between the two groups of English majors in their employment of colligations and the percentages of responses for each item in the questionnaire was calculated. Qualitatively, by analyzing the questionnaire, the students’attitudes towards learning colligations were summarized. In addition, errors of colligations in the students’essays were found out and the causes of the errors committed by the subjects were also analyzed.The results of this investigation demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between the number of correct colligations used in the students’essays and the scores of the essays. By means of t-test, it was found out that the English majors of Grade2011used significantly more colligations than the English majors of Grade2012. For both grades,"ADJ+N" colligations got the highest frequency of utilization, and then "V+N" colligations took the second place. Grade2012applied "PREP+N+PREP" colligations the least, while Grade2011utilized "N+PREP" colligations the least. Apart from that, the errors committed by the subjects in their essays are mainly caused by misunderstanding of the concept of colligation, inappropriate learning methods and lack of enough attention paid to colligation. Therefore, in English writing classes, teachers should introduce to English majors the use of words in depth, including collocation and colligation, that is, words and their relations with certain sentence patterns, to reduce interference of their mother tongue which results in incorrect use of some colligations. Ultimately, it is hoped that students’writing skills can be improved.