The Effects Of Input Frequency On College Students' Acquisition Of English Phrasal Verbs

In the field of Second Language Acquisition,input frequency is an important issue.It is worthy to study and discuss how input frequency affects Second Language Acquisition.However,in the past several decades,the effects of input frequency have been neglected.With the development of Usage-based Theories,effects of input frequency in SLA have been popular.Repetition rate and the contact rate are vital to learn language well.Frequency is the key to acquire language,because language rules come from lifelong learners' analysis of the language materials(Ellis,2002a).Frequency effects on all aspects of language processing and learning,and different language phenomenon's processing all depends on the frequency.What's more,phrasal verbs and frequency are the research hotspots in the field of SLA.This study takes 79 college students as the research subjects to investigate the effects of input frequency on the acquisition of phrasal verbs.Three questions to be discussed:1.Does input frequency have any effect on university students' acquisition of phrasal verbs? Which input is the most effective in 12 inputs?2.Does input frequency lead to differences in learners' acquisition of receptive and productive knowledge of phrasal verbs? If so,what are the differences?3.Do learners under different modes of input frequency show differences in their acquisition of phrasal verbs? If so,what are the differences?In the study,79 college students,taking the class as unit,were divided into two groups:group A and group B.The reading materials for group A are the same sentence,but in different order;the reading materials for group B are not identical.Therefore,two groups of students accept the same frequency of input,12 times,but the way is different.The subjects are given a test after every 3 times of reading.There are 4 tests in all.A week later,one test was conducted to check the students' acquisition of the target phrasal verbs.The results show that the input frequency has a significant effect on the acquisition of phrasal verbs.For most subjects,twelve times inputs have the most effective on learning phrasal verbs in this study.The influence of productive knowledge of phrasal verbs is greater than that of receptive knowledge.In the two input mode,the reading materials of varied repetition are more advantageous to the students' acquisition of phrasal verbs.