Teaching English Phrasal Verbs To Chinese Non-English Majors

English phrasal verbs are usually defined as idiomatic combinations of a verband adverb, or a verb and preposition (or verb with both an adverb and a preposition)(Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs). They are an important feature of modernEnglish and the most prolific source of new words. Hence they constitute an essentialpart of acquisition for English learners. However, phrasal verbs are difficult forlearners to master because of its complexity of meanings and structures, and its highproductivity. Furthermore, English teachers are used to dealing with phrasal verbsseparately and mechanically, which is time-consuming and ineffective, consequently,makes learners feel frustrated and lose interest in learning them.Many scholars abroad and at home have been trying to explore approaches for Englishlearners to learn phrasal verbs. However, those approaches fail to overcome the difficulties inlearning them. So based on the preceding studies, this thesis takes a social-cognitive perspectiveand applies a theory of a usage-based approach, along with its possible conductiveness to Englishphrasal verb teaching; moreover a curriculum for classroom practices is detailed. Finally in anattempt to fulfill the designed expectation, the author conducted a14-week experiment with twoclasses of non-English-major freshmen from Chongqing Jiaotong University. The experimentalclass (EC) followed a usage-based approach, while the control class (CC) followed a traditionalone. In the beginning of the treatment, a questionnaire and a pre-test are administered. After theexperiment, a posttest was carried out.With the help of SPSS V16.0, Independent-sample T-test and Paired-sampleT-test are conducted in order to display the results of the two tests.The results suggestthat students in EC made prominent progress in the mastery of English phrasal verbswhile students in CC remained almost unchanged. Therefore it is concluded thatcompared with the traditional one, a usage-based approach, emphasizing that throughabstracting and schematizing, linguistic skills result from accumulated experiencewith language, is able to overcome the syntactic and semantic difficulties in learning phrasal verbs, hence improve their mastery of them. Therefore it can be seen that ausage-based approach is applicable in English phrasal verb teaching.