| English phrasal verbs,composed of verbs and particles,are an important part of vocabulary and play a significant role in English learning.However,the complexity of phrasal verbs increases the difficulty of learners’ learning.Therefore,it is necessary to find a more efficient way to teach and acquire phrasal verbs.In the past years,scholars from home and abroad have done many studies on phrasal verbs in terms of semantics and teaching methods.These studies have the following features.First of all,the target particles show unicity in previous research,and most materials are from dictionaries instead of students’ textbooks.They are thus divorced from actual teaching;Secondly,previous studies mainly aimed at college students,finding that enhancing conceptual metaphor awareness can help college students better master phrasal verbs,but there are few relevant studies focusing on junior high school students.Different cognitive competence among college students and middle school students may lead to different results;Finally,previous researchers mainly studied the effect of conceptual metaphor on the acquisition of phrasal verbs,but there is limited research focusing on the effect of conceptual metaphor on the recognition of new phrasal verbs.Different from previous studies,participants in this research are junior high school students,and the target phrasal verbs are all from students’ textbooks.This research aims to find the effects of conceptual metaphor theory(CMT)on phrasal verbs acquisition and recognition of new English phrasal verbs.The two research questions in this study are as follows:1.What’s the effect of CMT-based explicit teaching on junior high school students’ acquisition of English phrasal verbs?2.What’s the effect of CMT-based explicit teaching on students’ recognition of newly encountered phrasal verbs?The participants of the present study are two parallel classes of Grade eight in Changsha Foreign Languages School.Both classes are composed of 25 students who constitute the experimental group and the control group respectively.Based on conceptual metaphor theory(CMT),the experimental group(EG)was instructed to acquire English phrasal verbs with explicit teaching while the control group(CG)was taught with the traditional method––translate phrasal verbs,make sentences with these phrasal verbs and recite the meaning of target phrases.The experiment data are analyzed by SPSS.22.According to the analysis results of independent-samples T-test and repeated-measure analysis of variance(ANOVA),this study draws the following results:1.Students in the experimental group performed better than the control group both in immediate posttest and delayed posttest,and the results show a significant difference(P<0.05)2.Students in the experimental group outperformed the control group in the test of recognizing newly encountered phrasal verbs,and there is the statistical significance(P=0.00<0.05)This research reveals that conceptual metaphor theory is effective for junior high school students in phrasal verb acquisition,contributing to the understanding and recognition of newly encountered phrasal verbs and providing an effective approach for learners and teachers to deal with phrasal verbs.But the study period is not long enough,meanwhile,it lacks tests to evaluate productive knowledge.Future researchers can make improvements based on these limitations. |
