A Corpus-based Study On Errors Of High-frequency Verb Collocations In High School Learners' Writings

Collocational competence has become an essential part of language competence since insufficient collocational knowledge has a direct influence on language fluency and accuracy.The importance of collocation has been increasingly emphasized in language teaching and learning.However,the acquisition of collocation is rather tough for Chinese English learners due to its abundance and arbitrary nature in most cases.Therefore,the study on collocational use by Chinese English learners is deemed necessary.Besides,though occurring frequently,high-frequency verbs also pose great problems for Chinese English learners as a result of its complex uses.Taking all these into account,based on error analysis,this study is to investigate the collocational use of high-frequency verb TAKE in Chinese high school learners' writings,aiming to offer some guidance to teaching and learning of high-frequency verbs and collocations in high school.Based on the TECCL corpus,the author collects all the concordance lines of TAKE from Chinese high school learners' writings with the help of Antconc software,and then finds out related collocations of TAKE.After the identification and analysis of uses of TAKE in learners' writings based on LDOCE,OCD and COCA are adopted to ascertain the accuracy of collocations of TAKE.The study reveals that delexical use of TAKE occurs most frequently in high school learners' writings and also the most error-prone.Six types of collocational errors of TAKE are identified:(1)misuse of verbs,i.e.,the substitution of high-frequency verb for specific verb or related phrases and confusion between high-frequency verbs;(2)misuse of nouns and noun phrases,referring to misuse of synonyms,number of nouns and modifiers before nouns;(3)misuse of phrasal verbs and verb phrases,i.e.,its wrong combinations with objects;(4)misuse of prepositions;(5)misuse of determiners;(6)structure deviations,i.e.,the misuse of related sentence patterns of the target verb.Among them,misuse of verbs constitutes the largest part of all collocational errors.Overall,Chinese high school English learners are lacking in collocational knowledge of high-frequency verb TAKE from both lexical and grammatical levels.Through the analysis of collocational errors,three probable underlying causes are identified:interlingual interference,intralingual interference and pedagogical causes.In this study,collocational errors from intralingual interference are more than those from interlingual interference.In view of these findings,some suggestions are offered to enhance teaching and learning of high-frequency verbs and collocations in high schools.First,emphasizing on high-frequency verbs.These verbs,especially its delexical use,deserve due attention from both teachers and students.High-frequency verbs are better learnt in collocations.Teachers can help students to realize the delicate relations between various senses of high-frequency verbs and different uses of phrasal verbs with the aid of metaphorical knowledge.Second,raising awareness of collocations.The occurrence of collocational errors in large part results from language learners' ignorance of the importance of collocation in language learning.Teachers can guide students to notice unexpected collocations in learning materials,deviant collocations in written tasks,and record collocations out of class.Third,enhance collocation teaching.Teachers can turn to native corpora to provide students with collocational knowledge of specific linguistic items in authentic context,such as collocates,collocational patterns,and semantic parody;teachers might as well strengthen collocational exercises in and out of class to increase students' collocation production;teachers should emphasize on the contrastive analysis of non-equivalence between Chinese collocations and English collocations to reduce negative first language transfer in collocation production.