應用多義詞網路教授英語片語式動詞：以空間介系詞out, up以及off為例

Abstract

Mastering phrasal verbs (PVs) has been a critical issue for learners in EFL environment for many years. PVs are often observed in satellite-framed language (S-language), such as English and German, which expresses the path of a motion by a main verb accompanied by a particle, while languages such as Spanish and French are referred to as verb-framed language (V-language), since their verbs alone convey both path and motion information (Talmy, 1988,2000). Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by the majority of EFL learners in Taiwan, as some cognitive linguists argue, belongs to S-language (Talmy, 2000, Slobin, 2004), although in recent years, more and more linguists believe Chinese should be categorized into a separate typology that is referred to as an equipollently-framed language (Chen and Guo 2008, Noguchi, 2011), where the concepts of manner and path are expressed in a series of verbs following the main motion verb. Be it a S- or E-language, Mandarin Chinese is not that entirely different from English in terms of motion construction. Arguably, Taiwanese learners should have relatively less difficulties in understanding the path trajectories depicted by various particles such as in, out, on, etc. in English than, let say, Japanese EFL learners whose first language, Japanese, is a V-language (Yasuda, 2010). Even languages of different typology from English could benefit from the cognitive instruction (CI) in learning PVs by explicitly teaching the fact that they converge on orientational metaphors that are extended from spatial orientations grounded in the experiences of human body. This was true for adult subjects in a Japanese EFL study (Yasuda, 2010), but not so for Taiwanese teenagers of basic English level who did not respond positively to this approach (Yang and Hsieh, 2010). In view of this, this present study is designed to investigate whether CI benefited the learning of PVs among young adults of intermediate proficiency in Taiwan.168 subjects in a university in northern Taiwan were recruited for a pilot study and a main study, and the participants in both studies were divided into two groups (CI and Non-CI group). The two Non-CI groups received a traditional approach, which in Taiwanese context is providing idiomatic Chinese translation, while the two CI groups were given CI with image schemas and polysemy networks linking all the senses of tested PVs. The PVs chosen for the study consist of 74 most frequent verbs in COCA (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) combining with three most frequent orientational particles, out, up, and off, yielding 204 combinations. After a familiarity and degree of difficulty test, these items were reduced to 92 PVs of 15 different senses (6 of out, 5 of up, and 4 of off) with a comparable distribution of basic senses and extended senses in usage to form an item bank for teaching and testing. In the pilot phase 36 PVs were taught over two sessions (30mins x 2), whereas in the main study 75 PVs were taught over a period of 23 weeks (one session per week and 40mins. per session). Except for the groups in the pilot study which only received comprehension pre-test and post-test, the groups in the main study were given comprehension and production pre-tests, post- and delayed post-tests. The results from the pilot study indicate that CI did not show any advantage over translation instruction in the short-term retention in the comprehension tasks. Such results were somewhat repeated in the main study in the comprehension tasks as well. However, in the productive tasks in the main study, CI group performed better than Non-CI group, particular in the long-term extension and extended senses. To conclude, although the translation approach still shows certain efficacy in this study, it is only limited to short-term retention. CI indeed helped learners attain better learning outcome than translation approach in long-term retention especially from pre-test to delayed post-test.