A Corpus-based Study Of Lexical Collocation Errors In Vocational And Technical College Students' Writing

Lexical collocation is an indispensable part of the learning process for foreign language learners,because lexical collocation is widely distributed in the English language.Since lexical collocation errors account for a high proportion of writing errors,it is a headache for foreign language learners.And lexical collocation learning is even more difficult for vocational and technical college students with a weak English foundation.Understanding the distribution and causes of lexical collocation errors is of great help to improve English teachers' teaching efficiency and English learners' learning proficiency.Therefore,the author believes that it is necessary to study lexical collocation errors systematically.Through these studies,teachers can adjust teaching plans in time,and focus on helping students solve problems arising in the process of English learning.Students can also avoid similar lexical collocation errors in the future writing process,thereby improving their collocation ability and overall language level.Based on Hausmann's six categories of lexical collocation error classification,this study adopts corpus analysis and error analysis.Firstly,the author transforms the compositions of 418 students from a vocational and technical college in Sichuan into TXT format and builds a miniature closed corpus.The corpus retrieval tool is AntConc 3.2.1.After collecting the corpus,statistics and records of the number of lexical collocation errors are made according to six categories of errors,and corresponding tables are drawn to classify the errors.According to Hausmann's six classifications of lexical collocation errors,this study classifies the lexical collocation errors into: 1)adjective + noun;2)noun + verb;3)noun + noun;4)adverb + adjective;5)verb + adverb;6)verb + noun.After completing their English compositions,the students were asked to complete the questionnaire,which contained 17 questions,each of which was presented in Chinese.This questionnaire mainly examines the lexical collocation errors in vocational and technical college students' writing and explores the reasons for these errors.Finally,the analysis is carried out with the help of AntConc 3.2.1 and SPSS.The results show that the main causes of errors are: 1)negative transfer of mother tongue;2)over-generalization of the rules;3)use the assumed synonym;4)wrong use of the collocation restriction.Based on the above findings,the author believes that in the process of lexical collocation teaching,teachers should:(1)minimize L1 influence in teaching process of the collocation;2)raise students' awareness and sensitivity of collocations;3)teach the frequently combined word groups as chunks;4)teach writing from the perspective of differences between English and Chinese.In addition,students should: 1)use the English-English dictionary and the collocation dictionary;2)increase the reading of the original English text.