An Empirical Study On Collocational Competence In The Writing Skills Of College English Majors

Writing has been a hot issue of English learning.Chinese students are influenced by the traditional form-based teaching which is characterized by the extra attention on the grammatical rules in writing.In their writing,the sentences are usually structurally accurate,but the essays are inclined to lack idiomaticity,which exerts passive impact on their writing proficiency.In view of this,a number of scholars and linguistics attempt to explore a more efficient approach to improve writing proficiency.Numerous previous studies have found that lack of collocational competence results in non-native expressions.Collocation is vitally important in English language acquisition and learning.In addition,it is considered to be one of the practical approaches to estimate whether the English language is native-like.In this study,college English major students' collocational competence and learning strategies are investigated quantitatively by means of the writing test and questionnaire survey,in the meantime,collocational error types are studied qualitatively.Within the framework of collocation and error analysis,the researcher analyzes the corpus in three aspects: the correlation between students' collocational competence and their writing proficiency,the collocational errors appeared in their writing and the factors of contributing to the errors,as well as the commonly used learning strategies of collocation.Ninety one college students who major in English are chosen as participants.All participants are required to complete an essay in 50 minutes of at least 300 words without the access to dictionaries or Internet.The collocational errors are identified with reference to dictionaries and corpora.The data extracted from the writing test and questionnaire survey are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.Based on this study,the results are presented as follows.Firstly,collocational competence is positively correlated to writing proficiency.In other words,the more commonly a learner uses various correct collocations,the more fluently and accurately he or she will write.Secondly,collocational errors occurring in 91 essays produced by participants fall into seven categories: mixture of parts of speech,literal translation from Chinese to English,collocational errors in noun,verb,adjective,adverb as well as preposition.This study points out that overgeneralization,negative transfer of the native language and faulty application of synonym are primarily responsible for the collocational errors.Thirdly,the primary strategies of memorizing and learning collocations found in this study include literal meaning memorization,guessingfrom context,rote memorization,looking up words in dictionaries,inference and exercise memorization.Several limitations with this study are displayed.For example,comparatively small samples of essays and the lack of experience of the researcher may influence the objectivity of this study.Nevertheless,the paper puts forward some suggestions for the collocational competence and improving writing proficiency.