Abstract
The study deals with English multi-word verbs. It aims at investigating the Iraqi EFL learner's ability to recognize and produce phrasal and prepositional verbs and so find out what types of multi-word verbs they find most difficult. To achieve this aim, a test has been conducted on fifty students from the fourth stage at the College of Arts- University of Baghdad for the academic year 2013/2014, preceded by a pilot test two weeks before. It has been found that the level of difficulty of the test ranges between (0.30) and (0.80). The results showed that EFL learners demonstrated poor performance in using the suitable preposition or particle when they were asked to recognize or produce multi-word verbs. The students performed better on the whole recognition level (51.4%) than the production level (22.1%).
Highlights
Learning a foreign language basically depends on vocabulary knowledge
This paper is an attempt to investigate this important part in EFL vocabulary learning. It is not easy for EFL learners to understand how to use English multi-word verbs, and this could be due to the difficulty they may encounter to recognize the relation between a verb and the preposition or particle that follows it
The present study tries to investigate the difficulty for Iraqi EFL learners to recognize and produce multi-word verbs
Summary
Learning a foreign language basically depends on vocabulary knowledge. To confirm the centrality of “word” in language learning Burton and Humphries (1992:73) maintain that "Good readers and listeners usually become good writers and speakers but none can be possible without learning sufficient vocabulary”. Learning multi- word verb is very important for English learners. Phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs in English may cause problems for many learners because they have several meanings and different syntactic patterns.
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