A Study Of Verb-Noun Collocations In L2Writing By PhD Students In Science And Engineering

The recent few years have witnessed an emerging interest in exploring the use of collocations by EFL learners. As a preliminary attempt to examine the problems of V-N collocation use in L2writing, this thesis reports a study on the use of V-N collocations by thirty Chinese PhD students of science and engineering in their essays.In the study, both appropriate V-N collocations and incorrect V-N collocations in the students’ essays were identified and subsequently submitted to quantitative and qualitative analysis by means of manual tagging and computer extraction.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:1. The PhD students used a considerable number of V-N collocations in their L2writings. V-N collocations of various structures were also used with different frequencies. On the whole, students employed the VO structure most frequently, followed by the VPO structure and the VOPO structure. VOINF, VOC and VOO structures were rarely used by students.2. About one quarter of V-N collocations used by the PhD students were inappropriate. Incorrect V-N collocations identified in the writings included both global errors and local errors, with the latter taking up a much greater proportion. Among the global errors, GWI (whole collocation inappropriate) errors stood out as a major type along with GSVC (stretched verb construction for verb) errors. Regarding local errors, verb errors occurred with the highest frequency, followed closely by noun errors while determiner errors were slightly fewer. Verb errors involved simple verbs in most cases, prepositional verbs in a few cases, particle-prepositional verbs and particle verbs rarely. For simple verb errors, most of them resulted from wrong choice of verb, such as confusion of semantically-related verbs, and overuse or underuse of high-frequency verbs. As for noun errors, the number of non-simple noun errors was slightly higher than that of simple noun errors. Both non-simple noun errors and simple noun errors were related with inappropriate choice of form (often noun plurality) and wrong choice of semantically-related nouns in most cases. Concerning determiner errors, most of them occurred because of missing articles.3. No significant correlation was found either between the number of V-N collocations and writing quality or between the accuracy rate of V-N collocations and writing quality.The above findings show the important role of V-N collocations in L2writing and confirm the problematic nature of V-N collocations. The major pedagogical implication drawn from this study is that teachers should raise students’collocation awareness, and draw students’ special attention to problems with high-frequency verbs and semantically-related verbs and nouns in the use of V-N collocations. Moreover, teachers should call students’attention to such grammatical details as the article and preposition elements in memorizing and using a V-N collocation. Besides, English teachers should also encourage and guide students to use collocations, and help students to recognize and reduce their production of inappropriate V-N collocations.