Study On Phrasal Verbs In Chinese English Majors’ Spoken English

In this study,the author explores phrasal verbs usage in Chinese English majors spoken English collected in Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0,under the theoretical framework of contrastive analysis hypothesis,error analysis and interlanguage,aiming to benefit English teachers for teaching and facilitate Chinese English majors’ efficient phrasal verbs learning.These three research questions are raised to achieve the author’s goal for this study:(1)what are the statistical analyses in using phrasal verbs among different levels of Chinese English majors in their spoken English demonstrated in SECCL 2.0?(2)are Chinese English majors using phrasal verbs in their spoken English competently? If not,what incompetence is shown in Chinese English majors’ phrasal verbs using in their spoken English?(3)what are the underlying factors that may lead to the aforementioned incompetence in Chinese English majors’ phrasal verbs usage?The author analyzes the selected data employing AntConc3.2.1 and WPS Excel to discover the statistical analyses of phrasal verbs usage in Chinese English majors’ TEM-4 and TEM-8 oral tests,and concludes that students’ ability to use phrasal verbs in spoken English improves as their English proficiency increases especially during the improvement stage from the low level to intermediate level.However,their ability to use phrasal verbs stagnates when they develop from intermediate to advanced proficiency level.And students’ ability in variety using of phrasal verbs is poor as they tend to master and use the basic meaning and combinations of certain phrasal verbs in their speaking while ignore other combinations which are of great number and of great importance in English vocabulary.During the process of quantitative study,the author finds out that there are some incompetent usage of phrasal verbs in Chinese English majors’ spoken English thus the author moves on to conduct qualitative analysis to generalize the incompetence using of phrasal verbs shown in SECCL 2.0 referring to the native English speakers’ corpus COCA.The author finds out that students tend to incompetently use phrasal verbs in the following three aspects:(1)simplified use;(2)collocation deviation and(3)misuse of verbs or particles.Detailed illustrations are presented with examples.Lastly,the author tries to explain why students show such incompetence in using phrasal verbs through interviewing on Chinese English majors,Chinese English teachers and foreign English teachers.Twenty English majors from universities in China mainland are randomly chosen to answer the interview questions.There are both sophomores and seniors included.Five Chinese English teachers and five foreign English teachers who teach English majors in universities in China mainland are interviewed.From the interview the author summarizes four factors that might cause the incompetence in using phrasal verbs:(1)weak awareness of phrasal verbs’ importance;(2)few theoretical background knowledge;(3)lack of practicing and(4)difficult choice among teaching/learning materials.Based on the interview results,the author makes some suggestions aiming to improve teachers’ teaching and students learning of phrasal verbs.