A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of High-frequency Verb TAKE

This study investigated the use of the high-frequency verb TAKE by the Chinese college learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), aiming to identify the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners and native-speaker learners in terms of the use of verb TAKE and uncover the distinctive features of Chinese EFL learners’use of TAKE. This study is also aimed at finding out more effective ways for the teaching and researching of the high-frequency verbs. Corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Error Analysis were carried out in the present study, with the subcorpora ST4 and ST6 of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) as the learner corpora and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) as the native speaker corpus.The analyses involved the overuse, underuse and misuse of the verb TAKE by the Chinese EFL learners in terms of major meanings, structural combinations and errors. Relevant instances of TAKE were further analyzed to probe into the reasons behind the differences. The findings indicate that the Chinese EFL learners use the verb TAKE in a quite different way from the native-speaker learners. Generally speaking, the non-English majors of ST4 tend to overuse the verb TAKE excessively while the English majors of ST6 slightly underuse it. Specifically speaking, as compared to the native-speaker learners, the Chinese EFL learners have their distinctive features:(1) They master fewer meanings of TAKE than the native speakers. The overuse of certain meanings results from certain high-frequency collocations (such as take a job and take... as an example) which are largely interfered by their corresponding equivalents in Chinese and the writing topics. Compared with the ST4 learners, the ST6 learners master more meanings and collocations and they are less affected by the writing topics. (2) In terms of structural combinations of the verb TAKE, the Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse the idiomatic phrases and underuse the delexical structures and the phrasal verbs. The overuse of the idiomatic phrases of TAKE is largely affected by the Chinese transfer and classroom teaching. The underuse of the delexical structures and phrasal verbs is due to the avoidance strategy and inadequate word and collocation knowledge. (3) The error analysis of TAKE was based on the classification of Gui and Yang (2003). From the perspective of the overall frequency, the ST6 learners commit fewer errors than the ST4 learners. From the perspective of error types, the ST6 learners and the ST4 learners have much in common. That is, the error types of "wd" and "cc" take up an overwhelming part of all the errors in both corpora. These errors are caused by some interlingual and intralingual factors such as language transfer, overgeneralization, and communication strategy. In comparison, in the process of EFL learning, the non-English majors are interfered by their mother tongue to a larger extend than the English majors.