An Error Analysis Of English Verb-noun Collocation In Senior High Schools And Its Teaching Strategies

Verb-noun collocation is one of the indispensable topics for both English educators and language researchers because of its value in accurate,fluent and idiomatic language use as well as lexical ability.A large number of studies have showed that many advanced L2 learners still produced infelicitous verb-noun collocations.However,the research subject is mainly college English learners and researches on English learners in senior high schools are rare.In view of the verb-noun collocation lag,exploring the lexical combinations produced by senior high school students may present different pictures of phraseological pattern and development,which could further provide valuable insight into how these collocations are best taught in senior high schools.Based on the error analysis theory,this thesis took senior high school students in grade two as research subjects and used the quantitative as well as qualitative research methods with an aim to explore the productive verb-noun collocation performance in the reading-writing continuation assignments.Research questions are as follows:(1)What characteristics appear in the English verb-noun collocations produced by English learners in senior high schools?(2)Is there a relationship between English proficiency and accuracy in senior high school students' production of verb-noun collocations?(3)Is there a relationship between congruency and accuracy in senior high school students' production of verb-noun collocations?(4)What proportion of verb-noun collocation errors are due to the influence of mother tongue?Analyses of 247 writing essays written by senior high school students yielded the following major findings:(1)Findings of the quantitative analysis indicated that English learners in senior high schools produced a small quantity of verb-noun collocations and overused a limited range of verb-noun collocations types,especially the VO structure,common phrases and delexical verbs.Nearly half of verb-noun collocations were recognized as erroneous collocations and they posed problems at all elements.For verbs,senior high school students represented a lack of grammatical concordance,the confusion of semantics,together with the great misuse of delexical verb make.In terms of nouns,the word for word translation was adopted to express their meanings and the semantic restrictions of nouns were neglected.Another salient characteristic of collocation errors pertained to the grammatical domain which included preposition errors and determiner errors.Lastly,they had tendency to self-create verb-noun collocations.(2)There was positive relationship between erroneous verb-noun collocations and English proficiency.(3)Senior high school learners had difficulties in incongruent collocations compared with congruent ones.(4)Further qualitative analysis of these errors revealed that in terms of English learners in senior high schools,the highly influential factor was the interference of mother tongue.In sum,both quantitative and qualitative deficiencies were identified in senior high school learners' performance on English verb-noun collocations.In light of these findings,some tentative teaching strategies have been put forward to boost collocation learning.Although this study implies that English learners in senior high schools may rely on the semantic information of mother tongue when processing English verb-noun collocations,it fails to reveal the psychological mechanism of collocation processing and production.In the future,diachronic researches can be used to deal with more types of collocations.