A Corpus-Driven Investigation of Chinese English Learners’ Performance of Verb-Noun Collocation: A Case Study of Ability

The paper makes a contrastive study on the performance of verb-noun collocation given by Chinese EFL learners based on the CLEC, ICLE and BNC. First, all the concordance lines with the token "ability " in the CLEC were collected and analyzed. Then, they were tagged manually in order to sort out the sentences in the verb-noun collocation structure. After that, a contrast was made between the data in the three corpora. The study found that there was a distinct gap between the use of verb-noun collocation between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners, and that Chinese EFL learners also gave less satisfactory performance in verb-noun collocation in terms of correctness and appropriateness