In foreign countries, there are also many researches on amplifiers based on learners corpora. Granger (Granger, 1998:199) comparatively researched the collocation situations of amplifiers ending with “-ly” between French-speaking English learners and English native speakers. The results showed that English learners underused both tokens and types of amplifiers. However, there were some differences in the use of “completely”, “totally” and “ highly” in statistical sense excessive use of “completely” and “totally”, but too little use of “ highly”. Altenberg (Altenberg, 1991:127) did a study based on the data of London Lund Corpus of Spoken English and found that very, so, very much, terribly, jolly, extremely are very commonly used in natives. Based on the data of British National Corpus, Kennedy (Kennedy, 2003:467) systematically investigated the collocations of 24 amplifiers and adjectives and participles. His research showed that fully, perfectly, dead, highly, very much, great1y, considerably tended to collocate with the words with positive prosody; total1y, utterly, extremely, badly, heavily, severely tended to collocate with the words with negative prosody; completely, entirely, absolutely, very, particularly, really, clearly, deeply, terribly, enormously, incredibly can collocate with the words with either positive or negative prosody.

Given previous researches，it is necessary to conduct a specific study on the use of amplifiers in written English of Chinese English learners. Specifically speaking, it is necessary to study the use of amplifiers in written English of Chinese college students. This research topic will make people get a better understanding of the learning situation of English of Chinese college students. To this end, this paper locates the study object to the written English to comparatively study the use of amplifiers in written English in both Chinese and American contexts.