THE STUDENTS’ FAMILIARITY TOWARD ENGLISH PHRASAL VERBS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

A phrasal verb is considered a challenging area for foreign language learners including those who learn English for specific purposes e.g English for tourism. However, to gain a good level of English, the students must learn phrasal verbs as they are commonly used by native English speakers. This study aimed to know the phrasal verb found in English for Tour and Travel Corpus (ETTC) and whether the students are familiar with the phrasal verbs found by differentiating them with prepositional verbs. The students’ familiarity was measured through a questionnaire and their ability to use them in speaking. ETTC was built from 100 articles related to Tour and Travel, and the annotation using CLAWS 7 was conducted to identify the phrasal verb found in the corpus. Then, the phrasal verbs were listed based on the lemma. Based on the result of the analysis, there are 172 multi-word verbs classified as phrasal verbs. The students who were expected to have already been familiar with them were not able to differentiate between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs. More interestingly, they do not know all the meaning of phrasal verbs found in ETTC and the speaking test result also proved that using phrasal verbs still needed more effort as the students could not use them accurately. The result of this research can be preliminary data for further research, particularly in teaching and learning English for a specific purpose.