台灣大學生口語及寫作中詞語搭配錯誤使用之研究

A Study of the Collocation Errors in the Oral and Written Production of the College Students in Taiwan

湯宜婷(Yi-Ting Eveline Tang)

指導教授 ： 陳純音

國立臺灣師範大學/文學院/英語學系/碩士(2004年)

摘要

無資料

關鍵字

詞語搭配 ； 詞語搭配錯誤 ； 詞語搭配能力 ； 口語表現 ； 寫作表現 ； 輸出知識

並列摘要

The present study aims to investigate the collocation errors in the oral and written production of Taiwanese college students’ English at different proficiency levels and to explore the sources of these errors.
Ninety-six freshmen in NTNU participated in the study. They were further divided into three levels, with 32 in each—advanced, intermediate, and elementary—based on their test results of the speaking and writing sections in a modified set of General English Proficiency Test (GEPT). The collocation errors in the two tasks were identified and analyzed.
A total of 545 collocation errors were found. Written collocation errors outnumbered oral ones, reaching a significance level; grammatical collocation errors outnumbered lexical ones. In the oral and writing tasks, it was found that LT1 (v + n), LT2 (adj + n; n + n), GT10 verb collocations were the most frequently produced error type; the least frequently made ones were GT8 (adj + that-clause), GT3 (n + that-clause), and LT7 (~conj~) errors.
With respect to the errors made by each proficiency group, the intermediate group made the most errors and the elementary group produced the fewest errors though the significance did not reach a significance level. In other words, our subjects’ collocation competence cannot serve as an indicator of their general language proficiency.
Although no significant difference in the error types was obtained at each proficiency level, a further qualitative analysis of the subjects’ errors showed that the errors made by the advanced learners mainly resulted from their bold attempts to make collocations based on their hypotheses. More complexity was involved in their word choice and phrase structures. The intermediate learners were considered to stay in a plateau where they were about to produce more challenging collocated forms but still could not get rid of the influence of their L1. The elementary learners seemed to have not tackled the problem with sound-form associations and of the properties of auxiliary verbs. The influence of L1 is obvious.
L1 transfer is considered to be the main source of these types of errors. Sources of the collocation errors were further discussed in six categories suggested by Liu (1999b, p. 488): overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, false concepts hypothesized, the use of synonyms, negative transfer, word coinage, and approximation.
Finally, it is suggested that further research can look into the differences between learners’ comprehension and production of collocations as well as the effect of teaching collocations.

並列關鍵字

collocation ； collocation errors ； collocation competence ； oral production ； written production ； productive knowledge

參考文獻

Liu, C. P. (1999a). A study of Chinese Culture University freshmen’s collocational competence: “Knowledge” as an example. Hwa Kang Journal of English Language Literature, 5, 81-99.

Bahns, J. (1993). Lexical collocations: A contrastive view. ELT Journal, 47(1), 56-63.

Bahns, J. & Eldaw, M. (1993). Should we teach EFL students collocations? System, 21(1), 101-114.

Benson, M., Benson, E. & Ilson, R. (1986). The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Brown, H. D. (1994a). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall Regents.