An Empirical Study Of Chinese Middle School Learners' Acquisition Of English Phrasal Verbs: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach

English phrasal verbs are notoriously difficult because of their polysemy and semantic opaqueness.They are one of the perennial sources of confusion and frustration for EFL learners because they have to learn English phrasal verbs by repeating memory,which is time-consuming and ineffective.As cognitive linguistics develops,it has been revealed that English phrasal verbs have seemingly arbitrary interpretations which are in fact,highly systematic.Three types of English phrasal verbs: V + up,V + on,V + over,whose particles are so semantically similar that can easily lead to ambiguity for EFL learners.The current study has classified the meanings of these �synonymous� phrasal verbs under the guidance of cognitive linguistics and developed seven image schemas underlying the distinctive meanings of these phrasal verbs.An investigation was carried out in a junior high school in Hangzhou to investigated the effects of cognitive linguistics-inspired(CL-inspired)English phrasal verbs approach,which applied image schema and conceptual metaphor in the instruction of English phrasal verbs.Ninety-three Chinese-speaking junior school learners of English were trained in an experimentalized Computer-Assisted Language Learning(e CALL)approach via a computer-based tutorial system of English phrasal verbs(TSPV).The experiment aims to find out:(1)Is instruction that focuses on contrasts between polysemic interpretations an effective way of English phrasal verbs instruction;(2)Which kind of approach(CL-inspired approach with schematic diagram feedback or dictionary meaning-based approach with translation and exemplar feedback)is more effective in English phrasal verbs learning;(3)How did learners grasp spatial and non-spatial meanings of English phrasal verbs after the computerbased training process.This study combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis,including two tests and one output task.The results of 2�2 mixed ANOVA between the experimental group and the control group showed that picture-sentence matching tasks based on the Competition Model theory can effectively facilitate learners' mastery of meaning-form pairing.The comparison between the two experimental groups revealed that the experimental group 1 receiving CL-inspired instructional approach along with schematic feedback outperform the experimental group 2 trained in a dictionary meaning-based instructional approach along with dictionary meaning and exemplar feedback.The research found that the feedback with image schemas provided more guidance for learners to distinguish between ambiguous phrasal verbs compared with the feedback with dictionary meanings and exemplar explanation.The result sheds light on the effectiveness of CL-inspired approach based on TSPV in the instruction of English phrasal verbs in a general sense.And the 2�2�2 mixed ANOVA indicated that the CL-inspired approach showed obvious advantages in facilitating the learners' grasp of non-spatial meanings of English phrasal verbs compared with their spatial meanings.The quantitative analysis of the task again has proven the effectiveness of cognitive linguistics in accounting for the extension of the meanings of phrasal verbs from spatial meanings to abstract non-spatial meanings.Based on these findings,the study thus has proposed an instructional approach of English phrasal verbs featured by the application of image schema theory to the explanation of the basic meaning and extended meaning of particles in the phrasal verbs,as well as the use of conceptual metaphor theory to deepen students' understanding and prediction of the non-spatial meanings of English phrasal verbs.The polysemic interpretations via the e CALL way could be integrated into the instruction of English phrasal verbs as a supplementary approach.