On The Collocational Errors In The Writings By Chinese EFL Learners: A Case Study In Anglo-Chinese College

The purpose of this study is to investigate the collocational errors in the writings of the college EFL learners. The subjects are 60 students who enrolled at Anglo-Chinese College, Fuzhou, Fujian. One hundred and eighty exam papers are collected and analyzed for collocational errors, after which the unacceptable grammatical or lexical collocation errors are classified according to types of errors they contained, using a modified classification system originally established by Benson, et al. A native-speaker corpus, the British National Corpus, is used as reference for identifying EFL learners' collocational errors. Suggestions for improvement of each of the ill-formed sentences consisting of these collocation errors are offered.A total of 544 collocational errors (297 grammatical collocation errors and 250 lexical collocation errors) are identified. It is found that Lex3 (adjective-noun) and Lex 1 (verb-noun) are the most frequent lexical collocation error types, and G4 (preposition-noun) and G8 (verb collocations) are the most frequent grammatical collocation error types. In addition, more grammatical collocation errors (294: 54.04ï¼…) are found than lexical ones (250:45.96ï¼…), and there were more collocational errors found in the low achievers' writings. L1 transfer is a common source of errors, though some appear to be intralingual or communication-based in nature. Literal translation is still a common strategy adopted by the subjects. This implies that EFL teachers should be mindful of these mis-collocations made by learners of a particular first language background, and collocations without first-language translation equivalents require special attention.