Some Chinese learners of English, even though with a good command of English grammar and a large vocabulary, still make mistakes in writing sentences with respect to lexical combination and semantic well-formedness.This paper aims to prove that there exist collocation differences across languages and discusses their effect upon English vocabulary teaching. It introduces the types of collocation and explores the factors that trigger cross-linguistic differences in collocation. We suggest that great attention to collocation be given in English vocabulary teaching.
