A Corpus-based Study On Collocation Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

English writing is one of the four basic skills that can best reflect students’ comprehensive application ability.It is also an important basis for testing students’ input and output of English knowledge.However,in senior high school students’ English writing,there are often various collocation errors,resulting in confusing language.General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2020 revised edition)pointed out that students should learn the common collocation of “adjectives and nouns”,“verbs and adverbs” and “verbs and nouns” et al.They should also accumulate lexical chunks and express meanings accurately.It can be seen that it is of far-reaching significance to explore the collocation errors in senior high school English writing and the underlying reasons hidden behind them.For the above reasons,the researcher has collected 240 English writing texts written by senior high school students from three grades to build three small corpora respectively.Based on the theories of error analysis and interlanguage,according to the classification of collocation errors in Chinese Learner English Corpus,the researcher has tried annotating the relevant written texts by referring to COCA,so as to conduct the comparative study and attribution analysis.Through typical case studies,and with the help of survey and teacher interviews,the aim of this study has been to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the major categories of collocation errors in senior high school students’ English writing? How are they distributed?(2)What are the similarities and differences of collocation errors in senior high school students’ English writing of different grades?(3)What are the underlying reasons for these collocation errors in senior high school students’ English writing?It has been found that:(1)There are 405 collocation errors in senior high school students’ English writing,which can be roughly divided into six categories.They are “verb + noun”(40%),“noun + verb”(20%),“adjective + noun”(18.27%),“noun + noun”(13.83%),“verb + adverb”(5.68%)and “adverb + adjective”(2.22%)collocation errors,ranking from high to low.(2)From the horizontal comparison,we can see although the ranking of the six categories of collocation errors is basically the same,the percentages of them vary from grade to grade.From the vertical comparison,we can see the collocation errors decrease as the grade increases,and they are relatively stable.Among them,“verb +noun” collocation errors decrease first and increase a little in the subsequent stage.While,on the whole,the other five types of collocation errors have a tendency of slow decrease between senior one and senior three,the decreased proportion of each type is not uniform.Through the chi-square test,only “noun + verb” collocation errors decrease significantly with the increase of grade.(3)The underlying reasons for these collocation errors lie basically in the following four aspects: first,interlingual interference,which is mainly caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue;second,intralingual interference,including overgeneralization,ignorance of collocation restrictions and false concept hypothesis;third,learners’ factors,including students’ learning attitudes,learning efforts and learning methods;finally,teachers’ factors,such as teaching methods and instructional strategies.To help students get rid of the above-mentioned collocation errors,the present researcher puts forward some suggestions from two perspectives.From the perspective of teaching,teachers are supposed to help students reduce collocation errors by emphasizing the differences between Chinese and English thinking modes,adopting the lexical chunk teaching method,providing timely feedback on collocation errors and reinforcing students’ collocation knowledge.From the perspective of learning,students can fully utilize the corpus resources,so as to acquire idiomatic English expressions.In addition,students need to learn English in the real context as much as possible,which helps build a correct target language system.