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rbal collocations in Chinese learners’ writing. At the same time it is necessary and significant to considercross-linguistic influences on verbal collocations.The present study is expected to find how the transfer occurs, also in what aspects itoccurs through identifying, collecting, categorizing and analyzing the errors happened inChinese high school students’ compositions. Therefore the author hopes to find the reasonsand provide solutions to the errors of verbal collocations in the high school writings. Inpractical aspect, this study could help teachers realize the importance of transfer and thestrategies of weakening the influence of negative transfer, which could promote studentswriting efficiency and reduce the error frequency of the verbal collocation in Englishwriting.
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2.1 Brief introduction of transfer theory and relevant theories

2.1.1 The historical development of language transfer
The word “transfer” is derived from the Latin word “transferre”. It is originally abasic concept in the field of psychology. However, the study of language transfer has gonethrough three stages. The earliest study on language transfer can be traced back to 1940sand 1950s when behaviorist learning theory prevailed. Then comes to 1960s, behavioristlearning theory is seriously criticized, and mentalist learning theory became prevalent.After 1970s, language is re-examined with the advancement of cognitivism.The first stage is during 1940s to 1950s when behaviorism plays a predominant role inthe field of language learning. Behaviorism explains that all the learning behaviors are akind of habit formation, which was applied to the field of language acquisition. Knowledgeand cultures related with learner’s L1 constituted the learner’s L1 habits would naturallyplace an influence on the establishment of the new sets of habits in L2 learning. At thisperiod, Fries and Lado are the most influential researchers on language learning. Accordingto the behaviorism of language learning, Fries (1945) argues that contrasts between alearner’s L1 and L2 should be made, and a scientific description of the learner’s targetlanguage should also be given, because L1 seems to be the main cause for the lack ofsuccess in L2 learning. Lado (1957) believes that the status of the native language is veryimportant. Based on the contrastive analysis (CA), he point out his famous ContrastiveAnalysis Hypothesis (CAH), which is “a way of comparing languages in order todetermine potential errors for the ultimate purpose of isolating what needs to be learnedand what does not need to be learned in a second language situation” (Gass & Selinker,2000: 72). However, not all the errors that L2 learners make cannot be ascribed to L1 andalso many errors predicted by CAH do not actually occur at all. As a result, languagetransfer studies from the behaviorist’s perspective faced great problems and gradually lostits position.
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2.2 The study on verbal lexical collocation
Speaking of the collocation, different scholars seem to have slightly different opinions on the definition over the past five decade. Although the definitions of them have much incommon, there is no agreement of definition which is widely accepted by the linguisticscholars.The term “collocation” was first proposed by the Firth in 1957. He indicated thatcollocations are actual words in habitual company. In his opinion, words a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。