A Corpus-based Analysis Of Chinese English Learners’ Adjective-noun Collocations In Writings

Under the mode of the exam-oriented education, the classroom teaching and text materials are the major channels for the Chinese students to gain the language input. And under the influence of the exam-oriented education, when the English teachers and the mass media editors teach English in class or compile the English newspapers, they invariably abuse and overuse the improper and incorrect expressions, so the students seldom receive the authentic and original language materials. All these factors lead to the lack of the input of the correct collocations for students. Recent years have witnessed the increasing severity of this problem, so a great number of scholars devote themselves to studying the English collocations, including the classification research and the description of the features. Some scholars also compare the differences of collocations between the native speakers and the EFL learners, and make error analysis of the collocations of the EFL learners.In the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the corpus linguistics has provided scientific support to the analysis of collocations. In spite of this advantage, the writer finds that the papers on the corpus-based analysis of collocations are less abundant, especially the analysis of the adjective-noun collocations. And very few scholars before have done researches of the adjective-noun collocations of the Chinese EFL learners. So in this study, the author selects the five evaluative adjectives "advanced", "rich", "prosperous", "strict", "colorful" to investigate the features of the adjective-noun collocations of the Chinese students in senior middle school, students of non-English majors and students of English majors. This study is based on the CLEC, and the author uses the COCA as a comparative corpus. The author will use these two corpora to compare the differences of the usage of the collocations of the native speakers and the EFL learners, conclude the reasons for the differences and finally explore the pedagogical implications with the main purpose of improving students’ awareness and practice of the accumulations of the authentic adjective-noun collocations.There are several tentative findings in this study, first, when Chinese students use the adjective-noun collocations, they tend to translate the mother tongue into the target language and the fossilization is developed. The mother tongue possesses the function of both the positive transfer and the negative transfer. Influenced by the negative transfer, the Chinese EFL learners prefer to translate the mother tongue into the target language literally and directly. Second, when Chinese students use the adjective-noun collocations, the evaluative adjectives that the nouns collocate with are relatively stable, for example, when they want to modify the "history" or "culture", they like to use "rich". This is because the Chinese students don’t have the awareness and the practice of accumulating the authentic expressions. Third, the Chinese students prefer to use abstract and general adjectives to modify the nouns, while the native speakers like to use concrete and vivid adjectives to modify the nouns. This is because the mental lexicons of the Chinese people and the native speakers are different. Fourth, the Chinese EFL learners fail to grasp the subtle differences among the synonyms and often abuse and misuse the synonyms in various contexts. This is because the students don’t develop the habit of using Chinese-English dictionary and they lack abundant language input. Fifth, the Chinese EFL learners like to use "prosperous society" and "prosperous country" in English compositions. This is because influenced by the Chinese newspapers, the students like to use positive words and expressions to praise the political phenomena.