A Study On V/N Collocations Of KNOWING Verbs In Chinese College EFL Students' Writing

As a subcategory of formulaic language,collocations and their use are of great importance in the process of English language learning.And collocational competence is a significant indicator of L2 learners' proficiency level in English learning.However,the studies on the collocation of learners indicate that learners often select inappropriate collocates in their writings.Therefore,more attention should be paid to the collocation in the interlanguage of EFL or ESL learners in SLA field.Besides,many researchers have focused on the functional forms of particular structure rather than the actual meaning of those structures.Moreover,although advanced learners have a tendency to perform better than intermediate and elementary ones,some studies discover that they would make more errors.Moreover,self-compiled corpora were employed in some studies,thus it is difficult for the readers to perform the comparison among the results with those in the relevant studies.Therefore,V/N collocation of KNOWING verbs used in Chinese learners' EFL writings is explored through the CIA approach in this study.In the contrastive analysis,a large number of authentic collocations extracted from the three corpora(CLEC,WECCL 2.0 and LOCNESS)are the source of the interlanguage of learners and TL of NSs.Three major KNOWING verbs:KNOW,LEARN and TEACH(Dixon,2016)are selected as the node words in this study.The V/N collocations used in the writings of Chinese EFL learners,the research objects,are compared with those in the compositions of NSs in terms of their frequency and the English grammar.And characteristics of Chinese EFL learners in the use of collocation are discovered and the corresponding causes of learners' inappropriate collocations are also inferred in this study.This study concludes that compared with the NSs,Chinese EFL learners have problems in overusing and misusing some collocates of the three node words.The phenomenon of underuse is relatively rare.The abstract nouns are the most collocates which are misused by learners,the corresponding proportion is more than 70%.Learners in senior year of university have better acquisition of collocation than those in junior year,while English majors learn better than non-English majors in most cases.The reason for the "overuse","underuse" and "misuse" of collocations is that Chinese learners of English do not pay enough attention to collocation learning and collocational knowledge is not fully acquired.Besides,learners do not step up to a way of thinking like NSs.In the process of writing,learners are usually influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue.Overgeneralization of certain collocational rules and avoidance strategies are also the reasons for learners' problems.The significance of this study is to provide Chinese teachers of English and EFL learners with a better way to discriminate different collocates.Besides,some implications for English teaching and learning could be offered from the perspective of semantics and corpus.The corpus-based research on collocations could be improved to a certain extent.The KNOWING verbs adopted in this study is a new classification proposed by Dixon in 2016 and it is based on the semantic meaning of verbs.The reasonableness of this classification could also be examined in terms of collocation and interlanguage.Some improvements in the classification of KNOWING verbs might be made for further research.