This study aims， from the perspective of Chinese EFL learners， to have a deeper understanding of collocational use in oral production and some of the problems involved， by adopting a corpus-based error analysis approach． The distribution of six types of collocational errors extracted from SECCL1． 0 and SECCL2． 0 are examined． In order to further explore the features and causes of these errors， both descriptive and diagnostic analyses have been conducted on verb-noun collocational errors． Descriptive data show that Chinese EFL learners have the greatest difficulty with the verbs ( including phrasal verbs) when using verb-noun collocations． Ｒesults of the diagnostic analysis indicate that L1 transfer， misuse of synonyms， overgeneralization and misselection of the target word are the main causes of verb-noun collocational errors． Therefore， it is suggested that college English teaching should attach more importance to the examination and diagnosis of collocational errors and also integrate corpusbased methods into vocabulary teaching．