Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In terms of the four essential abilities in the acquisition of English language, writinghas become one of the issues that plague EFL learners for years. Learners are inclined tolearn a growing number of words by rote and only focus attention on grammatical rules.In this way, it remains hard to improve the quality of writing. Vocabulary plays anindispensable part in writing whereas the traditional approach of acquiring vocabulary canhardly satisfy learners’ needs. When it comes to the expansion of the vocabulary, EFLlearners just memorize the literal meaning of a word and neglect the exact context inwhich the new word is used. Therefore, learners should have a deep understanding of theword and pay attention to words that habitually co-occur in the exact context in order tobecome natural and genuine in their writing.Some researchers have proposed that collocation exerts great influence on languagelearning. Collocation appropriateness will make the writing of EFL learners a lot moreauthentic. Firth (1951, p. 190) states that “meanings of collocation are an abstraction atthe syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approachto the meaning of words.” It is pointed out that there exist numerous co-occurrencerestrictions on the combinations of words. In contrast, words do not have adequatefreedom to co-occur, which reveals that EFL learners should attach sufficient importanceto collocation. Nesselhauf (2003) finds that advanced learners have difficulty inverb-noun collocation and examine how the degree of restriction of a combination anderrors triggered by learners are related. He lays emphasis on an L1- based approach to theteaching of collocations. An observation is made in Sadeghi (2010), who investigates thesignificance of collocation within lexis in the teaching and learning. She maintains that inthe light of applied linguistics, great importance has been attached to the orthographic,phonological and grammatical fields of language. Nonetheless, people have scantawareness of the lexical field. It is concluded that the solution of this problem is tointegrate a word’s notion with its collocation.
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1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Research
Collocation is a prominent aspect of language for EFL learners. In China, Englishmajors in college have a good command of basic language skills. A wealth of written orspoken English sentences formed by them are grammatically appropriate but do notalways look or sound native-like. This problem may arise from their habit of learningEnglish vocabulary. Nesselhauf (2003) finds that teachers devote attention toparadigmatic relations of lexical chunks (vertical relations of several lexis that are in theidentical class and can be replaced with each other). Little attention is paid to thesyntagmatic relations of lexical items (horizontal relations of the co-occurrence of wordcombinations, namely collocation). By and large, teachers and learners have to take intoconsideration the significance of collocation. Collocation becomes a vital factorinfluencing Chinese learners’proficiency of writing concerning fluency and accuracy.Learning collocation plays a significant part in helping learners achieve native-likeand natural writing competence. According to this, the present study is implemented toinquire into the correlation between the writing proficiency and collocational competence.The author hopes to make analysis on their error types as well as to explore theunderlying causes. This paper aims to investigate the commonly used learning strategiesand to give enlightening and tentative suggestions for EFL teaching and learning.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter elaborates different types of relevant views on the definitions andcategories of collocation. Additionally, it provides a theoretical rationale from the studieson collocation at home and abroad. The theory of error analysis is also presented anddetail
