Analysis On Collocation Errors In Vocational College Students’ English Writings

The research and analysis of collocation errors, made by non-English Majors, either in their speeches or writings has attracted many English teachers and educators. This research is to explore the strategy of improving collocation teaching for non-English major students in vocational colleges.The data employed in this study was selected from 118 non-English-Major freshmen’s writings of Dezhou Vocational and Technical College, analyzed through qualitative and quantitative research methods. The study has yielded the following major findings:1) The collocation errors of non-English Majors’ writings in vocational colleges are classfied into grammatical collocation errors and lexical collocation errors. The data shows that the number of lexical collocation errors is much greater than that of grammatical collocation errors.2) The grammatical collocation errors concerning preposition are significant, while among six types of lexical collocation errors, the number and percentage of “Verb+Noun” collocation errors ranks the first.This research aims at revealing a few most important reasons. Nagative Transfer of Chinese; Overgeneralization; Holistic Strategies; Overlooking Co-occurrence Restrictions; Exploiting Redundancy Strategies; Incomplete Rule Applications; Overlooking Semantic Constraints.The findings of the present research have the following pedagogical implications for English teachers of vocational colleges: First of all, English teachers should raise learners’ awareness of collocations in their teaching; Secondly, teachers should recommend dictionaries to their students which consist of common collocations, corpora and concordancing programs to reinforce students’ concept of collocations; Thirdly, the vocational English teachers should improve collocational competence of the students. Last but not least, teachers need to remind their students that literal translation should be used with great caution.In the last chapter, the thesis summarizes the research findings and limitations.