Based On The Use Of High-frequency Verb Do Corpus Of Chinese Efl Learners

At the very core of English vocabulary, verb category in particular, DO presents different aspects of English words, syntactically, semantically or pragmatically. The usages of DO of the native speakers (NS) manifest their distinctive thinking and logic. "How do you do?", "What are you doing?", and "Yes, I do." etc. are the common everyday English, and the similarity among these three expressions is the use of DO, which is good proof that DO is a verb frequently used by NS.Do is one of the most frequently used and most flexible verbs in English. It can be used as an auxiliary verb as well as a main verb. As an auxiliary, DO is used in questions, negatives, used to give emphasis to the main verb, to avoid repetition of a full verb and to reverse the order of the subject and verb etc. and as a main verb, it covers a wide range of senses such as performing or finishing an activity or task, working at or being busy with, and making or producing and so forth. As one of the highest frequency verbs, DO bears all the characteristics unique to the English language system like the other high frequency verbs and thus imposes difficulties on Chinese EFL learners. For instance, many Chinese EFL learners tend to use "do a crime" more often than "commit a crime" and "do an experiment" than "make or carry out an experiment" which the native speakers use less or never use (桂詩春#, 2008). Therefore, it is of great significance to do research based on the authentic data to find out the features of Chinese EFL learners' use of it.The current research based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA), employing a quite new research approach—a corpus-based approach, is aimed to investigate Chinese EFL learners' use of the high frequency verb DO so as to find out by comparing it in CLEC and LOB corpora how they use DO in contrast to those of native learners from the perspective of collocation.The result reveals that Chinese EFL learners are prone to overuse DO in writing. And they tend to produce heavily the following collocation types investigated in the current study: DO+ full verbs, primary or modal auxiliary verbs + DO, DO + prepositions, and DO + nouns. The causes of overuse of each type have been explored and it is found that such undue density of DO and heavily produced four types of collocation are caused primarily by mother tongue interference, transfer of instruction and so on.The study also finds that Chinese EFL learners' misuse situation of DO is severe, especially the "DO +noun" collocation pattern which is one of the greatest. Such examples are picked out and analyzed and the result shows that the causes have been complicated, among which language transfer, ignorance of collocation rules, and overgeneralization etc. bear the primary responsibility for the situation.Pedagogical implications inspired by the findings of the study are as follows: first corpus-based comparisons of the usages of an English word should be made in English language teaching (ELT) to minimize L1 interference; second, data-driven learning (DDL) should be applied to ELT or English language learning (ELL) to supplement the traditional methods of instruction; and third, Chinese EFL learners' awareness of collocation restriction should be raised to develop a good habit of collocation and avoid unacceptable collocations.