A Study Of The Avoidance Of Phrasal Verbs By Senior Middle School Students In Grade Three

Phrasal verbs are frequently used in the English language which requires Englishlearners have the ability to comprehend and produce them for their English proficiencylevels to further progressing. Also, English phrasal verbs are regarded as a difficultlinguistic item for Chinese students to master. Students are likely to avoid those are hardin learning a language. Just for that, it is necessary to find reasons that might contributeto students’ avoidance behavior and some constructive pedagogical suggestions onphrasal verb teaching are required for all the English instructors in China.The present study is proposed form two perspectives: the negative transfer of thelanguage transfer theory, the conceptual metaphor theory. It investigates whether seniormiddle school student in grade three avoid using phrasal verbs in English. And efforts aremade to probe the reasons that cause this behavior if they do have the tendency of avoidusing phrasal verb. This study is done through three tasks which are separately amultiple-choice test, a translation test and a questionnaire. It involves80senior middlestudents in grade three as well as10native speakers of English. The80senior middle school students are representative of two proficiency levels of English learners. The10native speakers of English are controls of this study. The conclusion of this study is listedin the following.1) Chinese senior middle school students in grade three do have the tendency ofusing phrasal verbs.2) The intermediate level students are more likely to avoid phrasal verbs comparedwith the advanced group.3) Figurative phrasal verbs are more frequently avoided by the students comparedwith literal ones.On the basis of the analysis of data, two main reasons that cause the avoidance ofphrasal verbs by senior middle school students in grade three are concluded. They are thenegative transfer of Chinese to English, the inherent complexity of second language itself.Some other reasons are also presented. Finally, pedagogical implications on phrasal verbsand vocabulary are proposed, just as let students exposed to English more, instill thesense of metaphor in the students, emphasis the importance of dictionary etc.