The paper makes a contrastive study on the performance of verb-noun collocation given by Chinese EFL learners based on the CLEC, ICLE and BNC. First, all the concordance lines with the token "ability" in the CLEC were collected and analyzed. Then, they were tagged manually in order to sort out the sentences in the verb-noun collocation structure. After that, a contrast was made between the data in the three corpora. The study found that there was a distinct gap between the use of verb-noun collocation between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners, and that Chinese EFL learners also gave less satisfactory performance in verb-noun collocation in terms of correctness and appropriateness.