Language transfer plays a critical role in second language acquisition.It has been proved that language transfer occurs in all the aspects of L2 learning.This paper,with a focus on lexical collocations,adopts a corpus approach and attempts to address the long-standing issue from different perspectives.On the face of it,the result from the research shows clearly that not just negative transfer,positive,transfer also takes place in the collocation.But actually,it is the conceptual metaphor rooted in experiences of cultures that acts as a major factor in language transfer in second language acquisition.Finally,a few suggestions of collocations are offered to benefit English Chinese learners in their L2 learning.