Intensifier-Verb Collocations in Academic English by Chinese Learners Compared to Native-Speaker Students

Abstract

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.

A Cross-sectional Study of Adverb Placement of Turkish EFL Learners

“…As hitherto addressed, all in all, L1 can be one of the sources of problematic structures in adverb placement Turkish EFL students in our study. This result is in line with the findings of Lightbown and Spada (2000) and Wu (2016) who argue the prominent effect of L1 on French and Chinese L2 learners of English, respectively.…”

“…One final study was carried out by Wu (2016) who examined the differences of the use regarding amplifier collocations. She investigated the data coming from three different corpora: a Chinese learner corpus, the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL 1.0 and 2.0), and two Native Speaker English corpora, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP).…”