The semantic complexity of the Chinese directional complement qilai has raised many researchers' interest in investigating how Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learners use this word, and results of previous studies often suggest that CSL leaners have great difficulty in applying this complement correctly. Corpus-based studies on CSL leaners' use of qilai, however, are mostly conducted with small-sized learner data, and the results might not be generalizable to how CSL learners use qilai overall. The current study is thus set out to examine CSL learners' misuse of qilai through analysis of 3-million-word Chinese learner corpus data. Results of this study showed that 1) CSL learners hadgreat difficulty in using the Stative meaning of qilai, and 2) most of the errors were attributable to misformation. In addition to the analysis of CSL learners' misuse of qilai, this study also investigated how qilai was introduced in the learners' learning materials. By examining the grammar explanations and the example sentences of qilai in these materials, the researchers found that the lack of detailed explanations as well as various example sentences of this directional complement might contribute to the learners' misuse of qilai. Based on the findings, some pedagogical suggestions were proposed to better improve CSL learners' learning of the directional complement qilai.