| Vocabulary collocation is a core aspect of language learning.Language learning doesn't simply entail acquiring individual vocabulary items.The language used by native English speakers doesn't only consist of vocabulary and grammar but also vocabulary collocations.Currently,research on vocabulary collocation mostly focuses on the collocational abilities of middle and low-level English learners,and not as much on that of high-level English learners.According to Gui & Yang's(2003)statistics on the types of composition errors found in the Chinese English Learner Corpus(CLEC),the most frequently occurring errors in Chinese English learners' English compositions were the verb-noun collocation.This study aims to analyze the characteristics,discover causes,and propose corresponding solutions for major verb-noun collocation errors in college students' CET-4 and CET-6 writings based on corpora.This study mainly discusses the following three questions:1.Base on the Contemporary American English Corpus,what are the characteristics of verb-noun collocation errors in College English Test Band 4 and 6 writings?2.What factors caused the verb-noun collocation errors in College English Test Band 4and 6 writings?3.How can we solve college students' verb-noun collocation errors effectively in teaching?For this study,the author adopted two sub-corpora St3 and St4 of the CLEC in order to extract the tagged verb-noun errors and then counted the high-frequency erroneous verbs that were used by college students.The author conducted an error analysis to detect typical verb-noun collocation errors in CET4 and CET6 and then used contrastive analysis to compare different usage characteristics of native English speakers from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)with those of Chinese English learners' from the CLEC.This paper analyzes the characteristics of verb-noun collocation errors of college students,and the differences in the usage of verb-noun collocation errors that have existed in among different levels of learners.Based on error analysis and the contrastive analysishypothesis theory,the author described and analyzed the verb-noun collocation errors from inter-language errors,intra-language errors.Through the exploration of the three questions above,it was found that the number of verb-noun collocation errors by different levels of English learners is varied,with the verb-noun collocation ability of advanced English learners is improved.However,advanced English learners are still limited in their usage of some common verbs,such as “ learn,make,get,do,etc”.Chinese English learners used fewer verbs than native speakers and selected fewer nouns to collocate with the same verb.Some college students' high frequency collocation usage are wrong.Besides,Chinese English learners tend to overuse delexical verbs.Most errors in verb-noun collocations are verbs and nouns.It was also found that the main reason for the verb-noun collocation error of college students was that the learners were affected by the negative transfer of their mother tongue,and by overgeneralizing and neglecting vocabulary collocation restrictions.Based on the characteristics of verb-noun collocation errors,the author proposes some teaching suggestions:(1)In the teaching vocabulary of a foreign language,teachers should pay attention to and emphasize the importance of learning vocabulary collocation.They should learn about the forms of usage as well as errors of high-frequency verbs in the writing of students and attempt to reduce the influence of negative transfer from the mother tongue.(2)Learn to use the corpus,by integrating the corpus and the existing collocation dictionary into daily learning,and to avoid errors when learning new vocabulary.(3)Learners had better fully expand the learned vocabulary.This study uses the error analysis in the verb-noun collocation of college students' CET-4and CET-6 writings to better understand the characteristics of such errors in writings and provide solutions for minimizing them,and thus hopes to give a point of reference for future research and teaching. |
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