| It is widely acknowledged that collocation plays a significant role in language teaching and learning.Over the past decades,the study of collocation has received increased interests and made great achievements as well.Nevertheless,collocation is still a difficult language aspect for learners in the process of language acquisition.So far,plenty of studies have proved that collocation can help learners in improving their language ability.There are quite a few studies chose college students and English majors as the research subjects to investigate the verb-noun collocational errors and made great achievements.Although the number of the studies emphasized on this issue is increasing,there are a few studies paid attention to Senior High School students,let alone Tibetan Senior High School students,a special group of learners in China who have much trouble than other Han learners in learning English.In the light of this phenomenon,this study chose Tibetan learners as research subjects to answer the following questions:(1)What is the correlation between Tibetan Senior High school students' verb-noun collocational errors and their English writing ability?(2)What are similarities and differences between ST2 of CLEC and SSC in the use of verb-noun collocations?(3)What factors are responsible for these verb-noun collocational errors?In order to answer the three questions above,the author collected 300 compositions of four topics in 4 exams of Tibetan Senior High School students in Gannan and set up a small-scale corpus called SSC whose token contains about 44532 words.All the use cases of verb-noun collocations are identified and compared to the Corpus of Contemporary of American English(COCA)and two English collocation dictionaries to check the accuracy and the verb-noun collocations are annotated by Contituent-Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System(CLAWS)part-of-speech(POS)tagger and extracted by AntConc3.4.4.For the sake of exploring the correlation between verb-noun collocational errors and the English ability of Tibetan Senior High School students,www.pigai.cn,an online service was used in this study as well.After identification,extraction and the statistical analysis,312 verb-noun collocational errors were selected from 473 verb-noun collocations.On the basis of classifications of Nesselhauf(2003)and Zhang and Yang(2009),the verb-noun collocational errors in the present study were divided into eight types:wrong form and choice of verbs,overuse and misuse of delexical verbs,wrong choice and number of nouns,misuse of determiners,misuse of prepositions,structure errors,wrong collocations and verbosity.The detailed description of each type of errors was presented as well.The findings of the present study are as follows:first of all,there are still some verb-noun collocational errors in students' compositions even those who got high scores in their English writing.This phenomenon shows the correction between the ability of collocation and learners' English ability is low.In comparison with ST2 of CLEC,there are more verb-noun collocational errors in Tibetan learners' compositions.The largest amount of collocational errors are verbs and this finding is similar with ST2.It can be found that collocational ability of most Tibetan learners is lower than other Han learners in China due to the interaction of three languages,intralingual causes and inappropriate teaching and learning methods.Tibetan learners have much trouble in learning fluent,accurate and native-like English.The study enlightens English teachers to raise learners' awareness of collocations,help learners to form a good habit of writing and so on.It also suggests Tibetan learners to make use of every condition that they have to improve their English writing ability.It is tough and long journey to reform the education of foreign language in minority areas and it needs the support of government and the public. |
PDF Full Text Request