An Empirical Study On Teaching English Phrasal Verbs In A Gesture-Integrated Multimodal Approach

Phrasal verbs have been regarded as an obstacle for Chinese EFL learners because of their seemingly random semantic extension from the literal to the abstract and their absence in the Chinese language.In the light of cognitive linguistics,previousresearches revealing the linguistic motivation and raising students' conceptual metaphor awareness have theoretically and empirically demonstrated positive learning outcomes in phrasal-verb teaching and learning.As an integrated part of language,gesture is embodied in nature and is able to manifest conceptual metaphor as well as externalize cognitive process,and these are the properties that are intrinsically connected with image schemas and conceptual metaphors.However,there are few researches on applying gestures to phrasal-verb teaching in addition to utilizing diagrams of image schemas,conceptual metaphors and oral instructions.To explore the potential effects of using gestures in phrasal-verb instruction,the current study theoretically investigated the connections among phrasal verb,image,speech and gesture in order to advance a gesture-integrated multimodal approach to phrasal-verb teaching,then empirically examined the effects of observing gestures on 42 senior high school students' learning of ten high-frequency phrasal verbs.The experimental group received 55-minute instructions with diagrams of image schemas,verbal speech and gestures,while the control group received the same time-length and the same content of instructions without the gestures.Note that during the experiment on the experimental group,two phrasal verbs were instructed with an emphasis on the correspondence between the metaphoric gestures and the,verbal metaphorical information,while the other eight were not.Then both groups were examined with a post-test that was comprised of two parts:ten blank fillings and five English-Chinese translations.The first part was intended to test the short-term memory retention of the taught senses and the second part was designed to examine the semantic inference making of the untaught senses.The results show that compared to the control group,the experimental group outperformed the control group in short-term retention of the taught senses as well as in semantic inference making of the untaught senses of the ten phrasal verbs,suggesting that gestures can promote deeper-level processing and comprehension of abstract notions,as well as facilitate conceptual mappings;the result of the pedagogical experiment inside the experimental group indicates that an explicit emphasis on the correspondence of the metaphoric gestures and the oral metaphorical messages can lead to better learning outcomes in both short-term retention and inference making,which sheds some light on the pedagogy of teaching phrasal verbs with gestures for English teachers of adolescent and adult learners.