An Empirical Study Of The Adjective-noun Collocational Competence Of English Majors

Collocation is one of the most important areas of research in linguistics and applied linguistics. Many language researchers and teachers have paid attention to the importance of collocation. Since Firth first introduced “collocation” into the linguistic field in 1957, a lot of studies on collocation have been made. But most of these studies are conducted from the theoretical perspective, and few studies research collocation from both theoretical and practical perspectives.This thesis conducts an empirical study on over 200 English majors of China University of Petroleum(East China). Through the results of the diagnostic test, the study aims to examine the features of the subjects on productive and receptive adjective-noun collocational competence, and the polysemous, synonymous and deverbal participial adjective-noun collocational competence are also involved. Then through the analysis of the questionnaire and interview, the possible reasons or causes are explored. The statistical techniques include descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, Post Hoc Scheffe Test and Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient. Based on the data analysis, we find:1. It is not as might be supposed at first that the students perform better and better on adjective-noun collocational competence from first year up to fourth year. The result is that the adjective-noun collocational competence increases gradually from first years up to third years. It significantly increases when the students get to the third year, but decreases in the fourth year.2. On the whole, the subjects do better in the productive adjective-noun collocation test than in the receptive adjective-noun collocation test. The mastery of deverbal participial adjectives is the best, while the mastery of synonymous adjectives is the worst among the three types of adjective-noun collocations under discussion.3. With regard to the relationship between adjective-noun collocational competence and collocation learning strategies, there is no significant correlation found in four groups. There are many factors that may influence the subjects’ acquisition of adjective-noun collocational knowledge, for example the language proficiency, the collocation awareness and so on.Based on the findings of the study, some feasible suggestions are put forward, including raising the learners’ awareness of collocation, encouraging the learners to use the collocation dictionary more often, encouraging the learners to do adjective-noun collocation exercises and so on.