A Corpus-Based Study of the Collocational Errors in the Writings of the EFL Learners in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Paochen Chen, 陳寶珍
• Other Authors: Chunyin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/80796239892106266412

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 91 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the collocational errors in the writings of the high school EFL learners in Taiwan. The subjects were 30 students who enrolled at YongChun High School, Taipei, Taiwan. Ninety exam papers were collected and analyzed for collocational errors, after which the unacceptable grammatical/lexical collocation errors were classified according to types of errors they contained, using a modified classification system originally established by Benson, et al. (1986b). A native-speaker corpus, the British National Corpus, was used as reference for identifying EFL learners’ collocational errors. Suggestions for improvement of each of the ill-formed sentences consisting of these collocation errors were offered. A total of 272 collocational errors (147 grammatical collocation errors and 125 lexical collocation errors) were identified. It was found that adjective-noun (L3) and verb-noun (L1) were the most frequent lexical collocation error types, and preposition-noun (G4) and verb collocations (G8) were the most frequent grammatical collocation error types. Other common lexical collocation error types in descending order were L7 (v+adv), L4 (n+v), and L6 (adv+adj). The least frequent types were G2 (n+ to infinitive), G6 (adj + to infinitive), G3 (n + that clause) and G7 (adj + that clause). In addition, more grammatical collocation errors (147: 54.04%) were found than lexical ones (125: 49.96%), and there were more collocational errors found in the low achievers’ writings. L1 transfer is a common source of errors, though some appears to be intralingual or communication-based in nature. Literal translation is still a common strategy adopted by the subjects. This implies that EFL teachers should be mindful of these mis-collocations made by learners of a particular first language background, and collocations without first-language translation equivalents require special attention. Finally, it is suggested that further study may look into a large number of subjects in big national tests, such as the General English Proficiency Tests or the Joint College Entrance Exams, to have a better picture of the collocational errors and competence of the EFL learners in Taiwan. A large-scale study of this kind may contribute to a more comprehensive database of the learners’ collocational errors, which may serve as a crucial part of a more “user friendly” computer collocation error-checking software package for the Chinese EFL learners.