A Corpus-based Study On The Collocation Of High-frequency Verbs By Different Levels Of Chinese EFL Learners

At present, more and more scholars think that the rich degree of lexis and collocation used by learners is regarded as one of norms that judges high quality compositions. However, the most of the relevant studies in China put their focus on lexical richness rather than collocational richness. Collocational richness consists of collocational density,collocational variation,collocational sophistication and collocational errors,by which the present paper conducts an investigation of collocational richness.The paper puts forward two research questions: 1) Is there any significant difference among learners with different English proficiency in terms of the collocational richness of three HFVs+N? What are the features of the collocational richness in three sub-corpus of CLEC? 2) Is there any significant difference amonh learners with different English proficiency in terms of the collocational errors of three HFVs+N?What are the features of the collocational errors in three sub-corpus of CLEC? As for collocational richness,the paper first selects the materials from three sub-corpus of CLEC, then retrieves the concordance line and frequency of co-occurence of make/take/give+N by Concordance in WordSmith, next, analyzes the changes of four dimensions of collocational richness by adopting Read’s measuring methods and formulas, observes whether there is significant difference among three different levels of learners and finds out the characteristics of collocational richness. As for collocational errors, firstly, according to the course of EA put forward by Corderde, the paper adopts three sub-corpus of CLEC marked as CC3 errors; then, retrieves the frequency of collocational errors by Concordance in WordSmith; next, based on the classification of errors proposed by Fan Lianyi, after classifying errors, the paper conducts the description of errors; finally,explains and evaluates significant difference among three different levels of learners and the characteristics of collocational errors.The results of collocational richness indicate that there is no significant difference among three different levels of learners in terms of collocational richness of make+N, whereas, there is significant difference between three levels of learnrs in terms of that of take/give+N. Therefore, the paper thinks that the collocational richness of make+N increases without the improvement of proficient level, whereas, that of take/give+N is positively correlated to proficient level. The results of collocational errors show that there is significant difference among three different levels of learners in terms of four types of errors of make/take/give+N. And the paper also finds that it is easier for low-level and mid-level learners to make lexical errors, whereas, advanced learners easily commit errors of syntactice structure; finally, according tocorresponding characteristics to collocational errors, the paper finds that low-level and mid-level learners overgeneralize the semantic features of three HFVs+N, and advanced learners make the collocational errors due to excessive dependance on their mother tongue.According to the analysis of the findings and conclusions, some pedagogical implications are offered.However, this paper is only a tentative study on the collocational richness of three HFVs+N and collocation errors. It is inevitable to make some errors in the analysis. Further studies should be expected to do in the future.