A CMT-based Study On High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Phrasal Verbs

Vocabulary learning is the most essential and important part in the study of a foreignlanguage. It is also an effective way to improve the students’ comprehensive ability ofusing language. English phrasal verbs, which are made up of verbs plus particles, are themost important part of the English vocabulary. On the one hand, they are widely used indaily life and play a very important role in communications because they are frequentlyused and have varieties of combinations；on the other hand, they become an obstacle forlearners to grasp the English language because they are difficult to understand and havemultiple meanings.In recent years, many experts and scholars in China have been trying to apply thetheory of cognitive linguistics to the study on the second language acquisition and haveachieved good results. However, most of them focus on analyzing the case studies or onthe multiple meanings of phrasal verbs and the studies on high school students’ acquisitionof phrasal verbs are fewer. This thesis explores the relation between high school students’acquisition of English phrasal verbs and the particle-centered teaching method based onCMT(the cognitive metaphor theory) through an empirical approach.The questions to be discussed in this thesis include: whether the particle-centeredteaching method based on CMT can improve high school students’ acquisition of Englishphrasal verbs; if it can, how the students’ metaphor awareness in the experimental groupand their attitudes towards the method are. The author adopted different teaching methodsto conduct the course for the students from the control group and the experimental grouprespectively at the same time for nearly a term. This study mainly adopts the quantitative methodology. The data are collected from two tests and a questionnaire survey andanalyzed by SPSS19statistical software for the outcome.The results show that the particle-centered method based on CMT is better than thetraditional one. It can not only promote the Chinese senior high school students’proficiency levels in the acquisition of English phrasal verbs, but also enhance thestudents’ awareness of metaphor. Students can distinguish a phrasal verb from the freecombination of words and have a better understanding of a phrasal verb with multiplemeanings in a certain context. Most students hold a positive attitude towards the newmethod. This study also reveals that using CMT to explain and analyze the meaning of theparticles contributes to the understanding and the use of English phrasal verbs, whichcorresponds to the characteristics of thinking and cognition of high school students. Itprovides an effective learning method for Chinese students to learn English phrasal verbsand proves to be very feasible.