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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
WANG Yi-yin, CHEN Ying-rong
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2023.08.005
School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang GongShang University, Hangzhou, China
This study presents a comparative analysis of verb-noun collocation errors made by Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency. Linguistic data from two sub-corpora of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus, Gui & Yang, 1999) consist of the compositions written freely by Chinese senior high school students (ST2) and the 3rd- and 4th-year English majors of Chinese universities (ST6). The study results show that four types of verb-noun collocation errors are frequently made due to incorrect L1 translation, misuse of relative synonyms, misuse of delexical verbs, and misuse of part of speech; the number of errors decreases with the development of language proficiency, especially errors by incorrect L1 translation and relative synonyms. And for both ST2 and ST6 EFL learners, errors resulted from incorrect L1 translation account for nearly a half with the same high-frequency words. It is also found that ST6 learners’ competence in collocation and synonym identification doesn’t grow with the increase of their vocabulary, as is shown in the case of overusing delexical verbs in collocation, the same error made by ST2 learners, who have a significantly weaker command of delexical verbs. Implications of the findings are also discussed with the purpose of raising the awareness of collocation pedagogy and enhancing EFL learners’ collocation competence.
verb-noun collocation errors, CLEC, Chinese EFL learners, a comparative study
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, August 2023, Vol. 13, No. 8, 585-592
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