Exploring Chinese Efl Learners' Receptive Knowledge Of Lexical Collocation

Collocational knowledge is essential and indispensable for second language learners as it is the basis of language learning and use.Most studies on collocation can be divided into three types:error analysis,L1 and L2 contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis.However,few studies have compared different types of lexical collocation to investigate differences or similarities among them.It is particularly true as for Chinese EFL learners.Besides,collocational knowledge can be divided into two process:receptive and productive knowledge(Webb et al,2013).Researches on collocation mainly make use of productive language data of learners(writing and speaking).Based on the research gap,this paper aims to investigate into receptive knowledge of two types of lexical collocation(A-N and V-N)of participants across three English proficiency levels through a self-designed collocation test.Results show that there is a significant difference between A-N and V-N,and between three groups of participants.Also,the influence of language transfer has been tested in this study.359 Chinese university students participated in this study,among which there are 204 first-year non-English majors(low English proficiency-Group C),62 third-year English majors(medium English level-Group B)and 93 graduate students majored in English(high proficiency level-Group A).Each word within the target collocations in the test was selected· carefully from the English 5,000 frequency word list to make sure that even first-year students have a minimum knowledge of target word.All participants(n=359)took a test of 40 items(20 for A-N collocations and 20 for V-N collocations).Each item had three choices to collocate with it and participants were required to make a sequence for three given collocations of each item based on their acceptability.Apart from the distinction between A-N and V-N,collocations can be grouped into three types,including "Correct Answer","Language-transfer Distracters" and "Word-association Distracters".Three weeks after the test,12 students from three language levels were interviewed to do the think-aloud task.The findings of this study are:1)for Group A and Group B,significant differences were found between A-N and V-N collocations in terms of the accuracy and L1 influence.2)students of low L2 proficiency(Group C)were more easily perplexed by "word-association distracters",drawing that collocation learning is a long process which needs much efforts and attention.3)language transfer was detected in the test for all groups of participants,confirming the role of cross-language influence on collocation acquisition and the fossilization theory.