A Contrastive Study Of Verb-noun Collocation Of Learn And Study Between Chinese EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

Collocation is a critical issue for EFL learners.Verb-noun collocation,among the most frequently occurring collocation errors,has been a hot topic in the literature.Some research attribute collocation errors to the negative transfer of learners' first language.Only a few explore the motivation in the cognitive perspective.This study aims to investigate the collocation errors of Chinese EFL learners by contrasting the collocations of learn and study produced by Chinese EFL learners with native English speakers,endeavoring to find the correlation between the collocation errors and conceptual transfer of learners.Specifically,it answers two research questions: 1)What are the differences of the noun collocates of the verb learn,and study between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers? 2)What are the causal factors of the differences? To retrieve collocations data,the corpora of Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL),and British National Corpus(BNC)were applied.A translation task was conducted to 30 Chinese EFL learners to obtain introspective information.The basic findings are summarized as follows.First,frequencies of prototypical and peripheral senses of learn and study used by Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in collocations are different.Chinese EFL learners produce a great deal of collocation errors such as learn knowledge,learn course,study knowledge,study lessons,etc.,and are confused by the similar senses of learn and study.Second,the differences are attributed to the conceptual transfer of Chinese EFL learners.Fundamentally,conceptual transfer of Chinese EFL learners is due to the different conceptual structures of learn and study and their Chinese counterparts,and the different patterns of conceptualization between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers as well.Implications are offered for language teachers to adjust their pedagogy to avoid incorrect collocations for learn and study.