| The study of collocation has received considerable attention in the field of language research and teaching over recent years. The high error rate of verb-noun collocation of Chinese EFL learners has always been the focus of collocation research. Based on two corpora-COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and CLEC (Chinese Learners English Corpus),this thesis conducts the verb/noun collocations of "accept" and "receive" to investigate the collocational differences and similarities between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers. To achieve this purpose, the methods of both quantitative computer-aided data retrieval and qualitative analysis are adopted. The results show that there exist stark differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in verb-noun collocation studies. Firstly,for "accept",among the top five collocations in COCA,only three of the collocations in CLEC tally with those in COCA. However, the highest-frequency collocation pattern of Chinese learners cannot be traced in COCA. Secondly, the error rate of verb-noun collocation of Chinese EFL learners ranks high. In CLEC, the incorrect collocation of"accept" is up to 40% and the rate goes to 15% in terms of the incorrect collocation of"receive". What’s more, from the percentage of collocation frequency to all occurrences, we can see that the highest percentage in COCA is 3.00%,compared with "accept" and "receive"in CLEC is 42.86%. This means that Chinese EFL learners have got limited number of collocation structures. Chinese EFL learners have difficulty in distinguishing English synonyms,especially those that have the similar meaning in Chinese. All the above differences can attribute to the fact that Chinese EFL learners lack the consciousness of fixed collocation expressions and is interfered by the negative language transfer of mother tongue.At the end of the thesis, some suggestions on the learning and teaching of verb-object collocations are provided. |
