Transfer and universality: Collocation use in advanced Chinese and Swedish learner English

Research hitherto has tended to show that, like vocabulary errors, wrong collocations are often due to transfer from L1, and hence that greater typological difference from the target language leads to more serious collocational errors. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the collocational errors of Swedish and Chinese students. 100 university students from each environment wrote a short essay following the same prompt. The most common verbs were identified and then all occurrences of verb + noun collocations with have, do, take and make were investigated. Collocations were divided into free and restricted and then into target-like and non-target-like. The results showed that the two groups chose similar sets of noun collocates and made similar types and proportions of errors. This suggests that intralingual factors are as important as L1 transfer in this area.