Implications Of Chinese EFL Learners' Collocation Errors For English Vocabulary Teaching And Learning

Firth (钱瑗, 1997:43) was the first to put forward the notion "collocation" in 1950s. He refers to collocation as a relation of "company", which means that the meaning of a word manifests in the word or words that accompany it in a context. The relation between "actual words in habitual company"(陈建生, 2000:35) is referred to by some linguists as syntagmatic relations. The mutual expectancy and dependency of collocations verifies Firth's thought that language is by nature "on-going".Halliday and Hason's (2001) definition of collocation stresses the relation between vocabulary and discourse. Being one of the two aspects of lexical cohesion, words in a collocation reflect both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, the latter shown in the co-occurrence of opposites and in unordered series. Cohesion can also be achieved by semantically unrelated words co-occurring in a given context.Sinclare (2000) defines collocation as "the co-occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text"(Sinclare, 2000:170). By means of computer concordance, corpus linguistics studies the collocates of a given node within a certain span. Lexical co-occurrence is more or less independent of grammatical patterns and positional relationship.In a lexical approach, lexical items are viewed as the core of a language and the basic units which constitute sentences that occur frequently and naturally in social communication. Lewis (1993) categorizes lexical items into 4 groups: words, multi-word items, collocations and institutionalized expressions. Multi-word items are what this thesis studies, but the most essential collocations and institutionalized expressions may become next topics for study.Benson (1986) defines collocation as "fixed, identified, non-idiomatic combinations" which can be classified into grammatical collocations and lexical collocations, each containing a number of subtypes. Grammatical collocations consist of nodes (usually the content words) and prepositions, infinitives and clauses, and lexical collocations are combinations of content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. This thesis generalizes 4 categories of grammatical collocations and 6 categories of lexical collocations on the basis of Benson's classification.Corpora-based studies discover that the number of collocations found through concordancing in various corpora is much larger than expected. However, the parameters for collocation identification have their respective limits and thus affect the validity of collocations.The objectives of the author's study is an attempt to find the most common types of collocation errors in college non-English majors' writings by comparing- the percentage of each subtype of errors recorded. Students' writings are collected and collocation errors are recorded and counted. The data analysis leads to the result of the study: errors in lexical collocations have a much higher percentage; collocations between content words and the proper use of prepositions are students' big problem.This thesis synthesizes the merits in the studies on errors in EFL learners' writings thus far made and attributes the reasons to the nature of English and learner strategies. As the mutual expectancy and dependency of English collocations are institutionalized, it is rather difficult for Chinese learners of English to understand their motivation. The other difficulty for Chinese learners is the interference of English synonyms. Learner strategies concerning collocation errors include transfer, overgeneralization and simplification. When learners attempt to creatively use words in combinations by comparing their target language with their mother tongue and previously learned knowledge about L2, errors take place.The study provides implications for English vocabulary teaching and learning: first, lexical approach views chunks rather than individual words as the basic unit of English vocabulary, and advises learners to memorize words in combinations in the form of multi-word item, collocations and institutionalized expressions. Second, rich information about collocation in ELT dictionaries can greatly help learners improve strategies of learning vocabulary. Third, teachers should consciously make use of corpus data and introduce concordance into classroom so as to cultivate and facilitate learners' autonomy.