A Study Of Verb-Noun Collocations In EFL Learners’ Oral Productions

The past few decades have seen the quick development of collocation studies. Collocation research areas, like measuring learner collocation knowledge, investigating learner collocation use and exploring effective collocation teaching methods, have all been touched upon, generating many fruitful results and proving the vital role of collocations in second language learning. Encouraged by this, the present thesis reports a study of Verb-Noun collocations in Chinese advanced-level EFL learners’ oral productions. Sixty student speeches were investigated, and twelve senior students attended follow-up interviews.The results are summarized as follows:1. The students under study were able to use a considerable amount of V-N collocations. Seven collocation types were detected with different occurrences.2. About one third of the collocations under study were problematic. VOPO and VPO were the most difficult structures for the subjects. Detailed analysis of collocation errors revealed broadly two types of errors:local and global, with the former outnumbering the latter. Local errors included verb errors, noun errors, determiner errors, and preposition errors. Verb and noun errors were the two largest groups of local errors, followed by determiner errors and preposition errors. In the group of global errors, GWI (whole collocation inappropriate) contained more errors than GSVC (stretched verb construction for verb). The analysis of interview data brought some possible reasons for collocation errors into the spotlight:influence of learners’ first language (L1), learning and communication-strategy based errors, and learner characteristics. L1influence proved to be the most salient reason.3. Significant correlation was only found to exist between students’ speech performance and the accuracy rate, but not the standardized frequency of collocations. No statistical significant difference was found among high, intermediate and low achievers in terms of the standardized frequency and accuracy rate.The above results further proved that collocations are both indispensable and problematic for second language learners. For Chinese EFL learners, the present study suggests constant revision of language knowledge. For Chinese EFL teachers, the present study also provides some suggestions. First, teachers need to draw students’ attention to using collocations correctly, rather than value only fluency. Second, teachers should be aware of the fixed nature of certain collocations and try to teach collocations as a whole so as to avoid over-analyzing collocations.