A collocation is a combination of two or more words commonly used together in English. The concept of collocation comes from the Latin meaning “to place together”. The linguistic meaning of this term was first used by JR Firth, a British linguist whose famous quote was: "You will know a word by the company it keeps." » (1957). Collocation is an indispensable part of any English text and also one of the most important devices that contribute to any well-organized writing. Ellis (1997) refers to “transfer” as “the influence that the learner's L1 exerts on the acquisition of an L2”. He stated that "language transfer, also known as L1 interference, linguistic interference and cross-meaning, refers to speakers or writers applying knowledge from their native language to a second language ". (Ellis 1997). Chinese ESL learners tend to be influenced by their native language and make transfer errors by using collocations both in their daily English conversation and in their English writing. In China today, learners are eager to learn more about the English language and its culture. English is only taught as a foreign language in schools; and outside the classroom, students communicate with other people primarily in Chinese. The environment that Chinese ESL learners are exposed to does not provide them with good opportunities to use English in real-world communication and gain a good understanding of the target language. As a result, Chinese learners are likely to be heavily influenced by their native language when learning English. Thus, the influence of L1 on Chinese learners' English proficiency deserves proper consideration and should be taken into account in English teaching.Literature ReviewA. Language transferDespite the relatively long history...... middle of article ...... translation tasks have been successfully paraphrased by many students while others have rarely been successfully paraphrased. The research project they carried out shows that the lower frequency of encounters with collocations in relation to their parts increases the tendency to forget the knowledge acquired during the encounter and that knowledge of the constituent parts of a certain collocation was most likely superior to knowledge of collocation as a whole (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993). Much research has previously been done by language experts to study the use of collocations among second language learners. However, the study from the angle of linguistic transfer still remains insufficient. Therefore, the study aims to explore the influence of language transfer on the use of collocations by analyzing Chinese ESL learners' performance on a sentence acceptability judgment task..