A Corpus-based Study Of Preposition+Noun Collocations In English Writing By Chinese Advanced English-major Undergraduates

Collocation competence is considered as a key criterion for measuring inter-language proficiency. The mastery of collocation contributes greatly to one's idiomatic expression and ensures successful native-like performance in a foreign language. With the rise of corpus linguistics in the 1980 s, the significance of corpus-based collocation study in foreign language teaching and research is becoming increasingly apparent.Based on contrastive inter-language analysis(CIA) and authentic language data supplied by corpora, the present research adopts both quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the gap between Chinese advanced English-major undergraduates' and native speakers' behavior of preposition + noun collocations, and also to probe into the underlying causes, aiming at providing some valuable enlightenment for foreign language vocabulary teaching and acquisition.The learner corpus employed here is the writing sub-corpus of junior and senior English-major college students from Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC), with LOCNESS as a reference, which is randomly chosen from British and American college students' essays. This thesis consists of such research procedures as extracting information through the retrieval software AntConc 3.2.4w, applying the Log-likelihood Calculator to perform online chi-square test and calculating MI-score to determine significant collocates, focusing on analyzing the usage of four common prepositions to, of, in, for collocating with nouns in the two corpora. Researches suggest that Chinese advanced English-major undergraduates differ greatly from native English speakers in terms of applying preposition + noun collocations: 1) collocates lack variety; 2) they tend to either overuse or underuse and even avoid using some significant collocates; 3) collocations are inaccurate. The gaps may be caused by: 1) mother tongue interference; 2) absence of some prepositions in Chinese; 3) insufficient input of target language; 4) overgeneralization.Based on the above findings, some suggestions are put forward on the learning and teaching of English preposition + noun collocations as follows. Firstly, teachers are supposed to raise learners' awareness of preposition + noun collocations. Besides, teachers should compare English preposition + noun collocations with possible Chinese equivalents during teaching and put special stress on those which are different in English and Chinese, in order to enable learners to avoid mother tongue interference. Furthermore, it is also advisable for teachers to increase the input of English preposition + noun collocations. Last but not least, corpus can be applied to facilitate foreign language teaching.