An Analysis of the Meanings of Particle DOWN in Phrasal Verbs based on Middle School English Textbooks

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the meanings of the particle ‘DOWN’ in phrasal verbs found on 37 publishers of the middle school English textbooks based on Lee(2004), Park(2012), and Collins COBUILD Phrasal Verbs Dictionary. As the main media for English learners, middle school English textbooks, must pay attention to contain the various meanings of phrasal verbs for the communication-oriented English education. To find the core-meaning and extended-meaning of phrasal verbs from textbooks, the procedure was to collect the particle ‘DOWN’ within the complete sentence units in the reading context of the middle school English textbooks and to analyze based on Park s (2012) categories. The results of this study shows that the core-meanings of particle ‘DOWN’ were distributed, but the extended-meanings were limited. In conclusion, to learn the various meanings of phrasal verbs effectively, it is necessary to present the core-meaning and extended-meaning of the phrasal verbs in the middle school textbooks context.