A Corpus-based Study On Developmental Features Of Downtoner Collocational Knowledge Among Chinese EFL Learners

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research principally aims to investigate the second language learners'interlanguage competence and to expand its development. The present research is meant to study the acquisition of English collocations by Chinese learners of English at three different proficiency levels -high school (HS), non-English majors (NM) and English majors (EM), in an attempt to describe the developmental features of English collocational knowledge.The research is based on the three sub-corpora of CLEC -HS, NM and EM, with the help of WordSmith Tools 5.0. Evidence for the development of collocational knowledge is sought in comparing the accurate use of both types and tokens of the selected downtoners across three corpora. It analyzes the overall frequencies of the downtoners, studies the collocational use of the eight selected downtoners in terms of their collocate types, tokens and the accuracy rates.The results show that in general, the Chinese EFL learners'accuracy and varieties of downtoner collocations is in proportion with their proficiency levels, i.e., the more proficient the learners are, the more varieties of patterns and the greater accuracy they use. However, with regard to the collocational use of enough, rather, just and at all, the greatest differences seem to be between HS and NM, and between NM and EM. The type accuracy rates tend to develop in a U-shape, i.e., learners'accuracy starts out high at HS, then drops at NM, before rising again to higher percentage rate of correctness at EM.