A Cognitive Approach To College Students’ Learning Of English Phrasal Verbs

Vocabulary is not only an important part of the English language, but also one of the indicators of the proficiency levels of English learners. Phrasal verbs are a vital component of the English vocabulary. Because of their flexible combination between the main verbs and their particles and due to their rich and subtle meanings, phrasal verbs are difficult to learn, thus widely recognized as one of the hardest and focal language items in English learning.Previous research on English phrasal verbs, mostly conducted from the perspective of syntax, semantics have obtained rich and positive results, but proposed few effective methods for phrasal verb teaching and learning. Since Lakoff put forward the conceptual metaphor theory, many researchers at home and abroad began to study English phrasal verbs learning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics by conducting relevant theoretical research and empirical studies. Regrettably, there are relatively few empirical studies which, from the perspective of cognitive motivation, focus on the research of classified phrasal verbs and test which type or types of phrasal verbs will get better teaching effects and higher learning efficiency from the cognitive teaching approach.The present study, with conceptual metaphor theory and image schema as its theoretical framework and cognitive motivation as its basis, examines English phrasal verbs by focusing on the particles, and is aimed at verifying and answering the following two research questions: First, does the cognitive teaching method help to improve college students’ learning of English phrasal verbs? Second, what type of phrasal verbs do college students learn more efficiently by means of cognitive teaching method?As participants of this empirical study, two classes were selected from Shandong University of Political Science and Law of English major sophomores. Class One served as the experimental group with the cognitive teaching method while Class Two serves as the control group with the traditional methods. The target phrasal verbs involved in the experiment were selected from the students’ textbook, while those used for tests come from Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary. The whole experiment lasted 12 weeks with a classroom session of 45 minutes each week. All the relevant data were collected by the phrasal verbs test.The experimental results show that the cognitive teaching method helps to improve students’ efficiency of phrasal verb learning, and that via cognitive teaching method students learn figurative phrasal verbs better and more effectively while their efficiency of learning literal phrasal verbs and completive phrasal verbs is also significantly promoted. Such research results and findings suggest that the cognitive teaching approach which focuses on the particles and cognitive motivations helps students both to understand and learn the different related meanings of phrasal verbs, and to speculate and interpret the figurative meanings and the extended senses of phrasal verbs.The present study shows that the relevant knowledge about conceptual metaphor and image schema can help college students understand cognitive motivations and in turn promote their efficiency of learning phrasal verbs. And this practice proves to be an effective method of learning English phrasal verbs. It is hoped that the present research will have some positive and enlightening implications for teaching and learning English phrasal verbs.