A Cognitive Perspective Into The Acquisition Of English Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal verbs are undoubtedly one of the perennial sources of confusion andfrustruction. They are difficult for language learners because the choice ofverb-particle combinations seems so unsystematic. In addition, some phrasal verbshave an idiomatic meaning,, which is usually attributed to the fact that the meaning ofthe complex unit does not result from the simple combination of those of itsconstituents. Cognitive linguists have begun to see the potential of cognitive approachto phrasal verbs, and have already conducted experiments, the results of whichsupport the hypothesis that the learning of phrasal verbs can indeed be made easier byCL-inspired pedagogy. However, few of those experiments throw any light on thelearning of phrasal verbs by Chinese English learners.The present study tries to investigate whether the congnitive approach to phrasalverbs is more effective than other methods. The subjects are120Accounting majorsenrolled in Shandong University of Finance and Economics. The students in thecontrol group learned the phrasal verbs through traditional instruction, while those inthe experimental group learned them through a cognitive approach. The wholeexperiment lasted for a semester. After the experiment, an immediate post-test wascarried out, and a delayed post-test was conducted two months later.Results show that students in the experimental group performed significantlybetter than those in the control group in both of the tests. The results also show thatstudents did not have a better retention of the taught phrasal verbs in the long-termmemory compared with those in the short-term memory after learning the cognitiveapproach. Futhermore, students exhibit an ability to transfer their knowledge ofexplicitly taught CL motivations to their processing of novel phrasal verbs.