A Corpus-based Study on Acquisition Mode of Continuation Task’s Collocational Constructions of Circumstantial Shell Nouns

This research is built upon a custom-developed continuation task mini-corpus, incorporating New Concept English and English novel corpora, the native-speaker LOCNESS corpus, and the COCA corpus. Utilizing Contrastive Interlanguage Approach, it thoroughly investigates the collocational constructions frequency, proportion, and Mutual Information (MI) values of five circumstantial shell nouns (environment, place, background, situation, position). The study reveals that students’ exhibit varied proficiency levels in specific collocational constructions, underscoring a disparity between instructional content and real-world language usage. English instruction should thus focus on students’ language application in specific contexts, employ a diverse range of teaching materials, and enhance the teaching of key lexical collocations. Educators should merge classroom teaching with practical language use to more effectively guide students’ language acquisition. Moreover, the significance of knowledge about collocational constructions of shell nouns in English learning cannot be overlooked. Teaching strategies should be flexibly adjusted to meet students’ specific needs, enhancing their deep understanding and effective application of English vocabulary collocations.