Chinese EFL Learners' Avoidance Of English PV Structure

Phrasal verbs are ubiquitous in all forms of written and spoken modern English, which makes the ability to understand and produce them a requisite for an adequate command of the English language. However, the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners is pervasive in their second language acquisition (SLA) process, which greatly puzzles many Chinese English educators. Just for that, to find the factors that might cause such avoidance behavior and consequently give some constructive suggestions on the future English PV teaching practice are quite necessary for all the Chinese English instructors. The empirical study conducted in this paper, therefore, is a constructive try to achieve at least some of the above-mentioned results.As for the subjects in this study, the total of eighty-five subjects who are averaged twenty years old have participated in the experimental test. Among them, seventy are Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners, while the other fifteen are American English native speakers (NSs). Coming from a second-leveled college in Sichuan Province, the seventy Chinese students, according to their scores in the College English Test-Band four (CET-4) and their daily classroom performance, are classified as the upper-intermediate and lower-intermediate level categories. They took one of three tests (multiple-choice test, translation test, memorization / recall test) in six independent groups, while the fifteen American NSs took the multiple-choice test alone, for the author considered the possibility that the translation test will involve the American native speakers' Chinese proficiency level and then may cause some troubles in the future data-collecting process or even greatly affect the accuracy of the statistics, at the same time, the recall test that relates to English material can hardly render any serious problems for such native speakers. As for the testing materials used in this study, two kinds of English phrasal verbs, here refers to the literal and figurative ones, act as the key constructing elements when they appear in the three forms of tests that derive from the fifteen short dialogues.As the ANOVA results show that, on the one hand, Chinese EFL learners,...