A Comparative Study Of Verb-noun Collocations In The Academic Writing Of Advanced Chinese Learners And English Native Speakers

Collocation is an important part in English teaching and learning. Studies in collocation mainly focus on the collocational errors made by non-native speakers of intermediate levels. However, few studies focus on verb-noun collocations produced in the academic writings of advanced learners of English. The present study aims to investigate the accuracy of verb-noun collocations produced in Chinese Master of Arts thesis, doctoral dissertations.In order to operate that investigation, four corpora were compiled, which were the Chinese Learners’ Master Thesis Corpus(CM) and Chinese Doctor Dissertation Corpus(CD), the English Native Speakers’ Master Thesis Corpus(EM) and English Doctor Dissertation Corpus(ED). Fifty nouns that occurred in all these four corpora and the corresponding verb-noun collocations were extracted. Then, four comparisons between the four corpora were made in this study to investigate the number of correct verb-noun collocations and the type token ratio of all the combinations associated with every single noun to find out the collcation accuracy and variance.The results showed that ED contained the largest number of correct verb-noun collocations, EM had fewer ones than ED but more than CD, and CM had the least. The statistics proved that native speakers produced more correct verb-noun collocations than non-native speakers, doctors produced more correct ones than masters. In addition,English native speakers used more variant words than Chinese learners, and doctors used more variant words than masters in the verb-noun collocations.This study provides academic norms for English learning and teaching in the perspective of verb-noun collocation. Teachers are supposed to lead the learners to realize the importance of collocation accuracy and variance, and use authentic teaching materials to enhance their collocational competence.