A Study On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Difficulty Of English Phrasal Verbs

This study is triggered by the bottleneck phenomenon of phrasal verb(pv) acquisition by Chinese learners of English.PV,a crucial section of idiom,seems to be of great difficulty for Chinese learners.The present study attempts to explore the PV acquisition difficulty by investigating the effects of transparency and familiarity in terms of PV reception and production.All the participants were freshmen from School of English for International Business of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.The whole experiment was composed of three sections:questionnaire,pre-test(PV comprehension test, one-word verb knowledge test),and post-test(translation test and multiple-choice test).Different phrasal verb types,literal phrasal verbs(LPV),figurative phrasal verbs(FPV),and extended figurative phrasal verbs(EFPV),were included in the test with the purpose of identifying the effects of transparency.In the questionnaire, familiarity ratings for the English phrasal verbs were obtained.A PV comprehension test in pre-test was carried out to examine learners' PV reception,and a one-word verb knowledge test in pre-test to check the knowledge of PV equivalent one-word verb for post-test.A multiple-choice test and a translation test in the post-test were to investigate PV production by testing avoidance tendency.The results showed that familiarity and transparency had effects on PV acquisition.All the familiar PVs were better comprehended than less-familiar ones. Compared with LPVs,FPVs and EFPVs generally posed much more difficulty in comprehension.Nevertheless,the difference between familiar LPVs and familiar FPVs was not statistically significant,which implied that familiarity had a significant effect on FPV comprehension.In the test of PV production,LPVs were more frequently avoided than FPVs and EFPVs.However,familiarity didn't seem to exert a significant effect on production.In sum,transparency of PVs plays a vital role in PV acquisition.Familiarity also was a factor,but had a limited influence on production.The present study is expected to expend the scope of relevant researches both theoretically and empirically.By providing evidence of the effects of transparency and familiarity on PV acquisition and by adapting idiom theoretical framework to PV acquisition from a cognitive perspective,new lights could be shed on the study of Chinese learners' PV acquisition,as well as on learning and teaching strategies.