The Effects Of Input Frequency On Junior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Phrasal Verbs

Lexical chunks and frequency effect are crucial areas for further study in the field of second language acquisition.Few researchers have,however,looked into the effects of input frequency in the past few decades due to the dominance of "innateness hypothesis".The effects of input frequency in SLA have slowly come to light with the advent of new theories like usage-based linguistics.It is important to note that prior research has supported the effects of input frequency on the acquisition of second language vocabulary,but there is no consensus on the frequency required for vocabulary acquisition,and only a few studies have been conducted with junior high school students.Therefore,how input frequency affects the junior high school students’ acquisition of English phrasal verbs deserves further study.With 120 junior high school students as the participants,this study set out to evaluate the effects of input frequency on phrasal verb acquisition based on prior relevant studies.The study addressed the following three research questions:1.Does input frequency affect how phrasal verbs are acquired by junior high school students? If so,how does it work?2.Are there any differences in input frequency on junior high school students’ acquisition of receptive knowledge and productive knowledge of English phrasal verbs? If so,how do they differ?3.Do the two modes of input frequency(verbatim repetition and varied repetition)make any differences in the acquisition of English phrasal verbs of junior high school students? If so,what are the differences?The experiment was designed based on the aforementioned queries: The 120 participants were split into two groups,Group A received verbatim repetition,whereas Group B encountered varied repetition.Each group was subsequently subdivided into three groups,exposed to the sentences 3,6,and 9 times respectively.After reading,there was a surprise immediate test for each group.The test consisted of six sections,including receptive and productive knowledge in form,meaning,and grammar.Three days after the test,eighteen subjects were invited to have a retrospective interview.The collected data were analyzed using SPSS and the results were as follows:Firstly,input frequency affects the junior high school students’ acquisition of English phrasal verbs,and the more the encounters,the better the acquisition effect.Secondly,input frequency has a various effect on junior high school students’ productive knowledge acquisition of phrasal verbs and on receptive knowledge acquisition.Receptive knowledge showed a tendency of rapid growth from three to six times,followed by a slight decline from six to nine times.As for productive knowledge,the scoring rate continued to increase from three to nine times,with rapid growth initially but a slight rise later on.Finally,in the study of junior high school students’ acquisition of phrasal verbs,participants under varied repetition outperformed those under verbatim repetition.The results of the study enrich the research on the effects of input frequency on phrasal verbs.Furthermore,this study has some modest implications for how English vocabulary is taught.In order to properly utilize the benefits of frequency,the teaching process should put a strong emphasis on using frequency,selecting different modes and intensities of frequency in exact accordance with various learning tasks.