An Empirical Study Of English Phrasal Verb Acquisition By Chinese College Students: Contextualization Vs De-contextualization

Phrasal verbs, generally defined as idiomatic combinations of a verb and adverb or a verb and preposition, or a verb with both adverb and preposition, are pervasively used in English as an essential part of everyday communication. The ability to use phrasal verbs correctly is a requisite for a good command of English language.There is little research on studying the effective methods of learning phrasal verbs even though the importance and difficulties of learning them have been recognized. This thesis aims to investigate the effects of different learning methods—translation-based learning (abbreviated as TBL) and context-based learning (abbreviated as CBL)—so as to find effective approaches to learning phrasal verbs, and it intends to explore the causes underlying the difficulties in phrasal verb learning as well.The present study is conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively. Two groups of the subjects are second-year non-English majors at Jincheng College of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They are from two parallel classes with the same average English proficiency level. The subjects are required to learn the same 30 phrasal verbs in different learning methods, one group in TBL, the other in CBL. Recognition and production tests are designed to evaluate their receptive knowledge and productive knowledge. Data are collected by means of administering immediate and delayed tests, asking subjects to write self-reports and conducting retrospective interviews. With the help of SPSS V13.0, the collected data are analyzed.The results of the independent sample t-tests indicate that there is a significant difference between the two learning methods. In recognition tests, TBL is superior to CBL; while in production tests, CBL is more advantageous than TBL. The present study also confirms the assumption that CBL is conducive to phrasal verb retention."Levels of processing theory"is applied to the explanations of the different cognitive processing in CBL and TBL. Furthermore, based on the results of the self-reports and the interviews, major causes underlying the difficulties in phrasal verb learning are generalized. They are the manifold meanings, the complicated syntactical structures of phrasal verbs and the structural differences between Chinese and English. Idiomatic phrasal verbs are proved to be more difficult to learn than the literal ones.The findings of the present study provide inspiration for the teaching practice of phrasal verbs. This study also puts forward some effective approaches to phrasal verb learning, which will help Chinese learners grasp phrasal verbs and improve their English proficiency.