English

Min Chang Sung,Hyunwoo Kim

doi:10.17576/3l-2016-2202-11

Abstract

This study investigates the production patterns of English phrasal verbs (PV) by Korean-speaking foreign language learners of English, with a special focus placed on two structural features of PVs, namely, transitivity and particle placement. It offers a developmental perspective by analysing the production performance of PVs for three learner corpora at different proficiency levels (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and a native corpus. The results show that, while the basic- and intermediate-level learners significantly underused both transitive and intransitive PVs compared to the native speakers, the proportions of transitive and intransitive PVs in the advanced-learner corpus were statistically indistinguishable from those in the native corpus. In addition, verb-particle separation was identified only in the advanced-leaner and native corpora, indicating the specific developmental aspects underlying the L2 acquisition of PVs. The advanced learners, however, were found to be less capable of adhering to the end-weight principle and the givenness condition when structuring transitive PVs compared to the native speakers. These results suggest that associating contextual information with PV structures may be a major source of difficulty when teaching and learning PVs. Keywords: phrasal verbs; learner corpora; particle placement; end-weight principle; givenness condition DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2202-11

Highlights

Learning English phrasal verbs (PVs: e.g., figure out and hold on) has been a chronic difficulty for learners of English as a second or a foreign language (ESL or EFL)
English learners may operate at different levels of semantic complexity when using PVs in their L2”. These findings offer a new perspective for examining the production of PVs in L2 learners based on a multi-level analysis of the three structural patterns of PVs, they are difficult to generalise across different learner populations since the research was restricted to European-language-speaking learners of English, and the learner corpus only contained production data from advanced learners
The results revealed a main effect of Group, F(3, 152) = 13.291, p < .001, which suggests that the four groups differed significantly in their productions of PVs

Summary

Introduction

Learning English phrasal verbs (PVs: e.g., figure out and hold on) has been a chronic difficulty for learners of English as a second or a foreign language (ESL or EFL). Even advanced learners of English have been reported having difficulties in achieving native-like production of PVs (Laufer & Eliasson 1993, Siyanova & Schmitt 2007) These persistent difficulties with English PVs have mostly been accounted for by language-external factors, e.g., L1 influence (Dagut & Laufer 1985) and inefficient instruction (Yasuda 2010) as well as language-internal idiosyncratic features of PVs, for example, semantic opaqueness (Lennon 1996), synonymous one-word verbs (Waibel 2007), and register- or context-appropriateness (Kovács 2014).

Methods

Results

Conclusion