A Corpus Study of Collocation in Chinese Learner English

Book excerpt: Collocation is an important tool in describing lexical behaviour in language and has received increasing attention in recent years. Based on two corpora: LOCNESS (the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) and MLC (the Non-English major Mainland Chinese Learner Corpus), this book explores the features of Chinese learner English with analysis of grammatical and lexical collocations. The findings show that Chinese university students use collocations with considerably less variety and Chinese language and culture exert a substantial influence on their English writing. It also discusses ways to tackle the problems Chinese English learners face and the pedagogical implications for teaching English and learning English collocations. As one of the first systematic studies to investigate collocations in Chinese learner English based on learner corpora, this book not only analyzes how Chinese learners use collocations in their English writing, but also provides significant implications for foreign language teaching and learning.