A Study Of Phrasal Verb Acquisition Guided By The Concept-Based Instruction At Vocational & Technical Colleges

Nowadays, the quality and effect of education at vocational college have attracted more attention from English teachers, researchers, and the society. The target of English teaching should not be confined to the cultivation of learners’mastering of interactive language skills; instead, it ought to be constructing learners’ language foundation. As a notably important feature of the English for EFL learners, verb-particle constructions are usually defined as "idiomatic combinations of a verb and an adverb, or a verb and a preposition, or a verb with both an adverb and a preposition" (John Sinclair,1989:15). Although verb-particle constructions are widely used in modern English, because of their complexity of meanings and structures, they are difficult for students to comprehend and master. Moreover, traditional methods substantially focus on student’s mechanical memory rather than the components and internal mechanism of phrasal verbs. Thus, a great number of researchers have striven for innovative and systematic teaching methods for English phrasal verbs (Dirven,2001; Gries,1999; Kurtyka,2001; Langacker,1992; Rudzka-Ostyn,2003; Tyler & Evans,2001,2003). Moreover, most of these researchers have chosen particles as target teaching items, because they are productive and shared similar semantics in constituting diverse constructions including phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases and compounds (Hyewon,2012:256). Therefore, particle was also chosen as a focus of this study.This thesis adopted an innovative method-Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) and reported on an implementation of CBI on English phrasal verbs to verify teaching effect of this kind of instruction. In the teaching implementation, scientific concepts were essentially taken into account and successive SCOBAs (Schemas for the Orienting Basis of Action) were presented and utilized in this research. This study was combined with sociocultural theory and cognitive linguistics focusing on the basic meanings and extended meanings of particles, so that students were capable of mastering a conceptual understanding of verb-particle constructions.A total of 40 students at a vocational college were engaged in this experiment. The whole instruction lasted eight weeks which mainly introduced to the students the semantic meaning of two particles-out and up. Participants in the experimental group were received CBI, but participants in the control group obtained the traditional approach--translated sentences, did some exercises and then memorized the target grammar. The participants’performances in three tests and homework assignments were analyzed to investigate learner’s development. The quantitative data consisted of multiple-choice items in three tests, were to evaluate whether students were capable of choosing an appropriate phrasal verb in a series of varied sentential contexts. The qualitative data sets included the definition task and verbalization task. In addition, two questionnaires were added to this research to reveal the effect of instruction and to reinforce the learning process.Accordingly, SPSS 19.0 was adopted to demonstrate differences between scores on the pre-instruction and post-instruction tasks. Before instructions, the differences of control group and the experimental group were insignificant. However, compared with the control group, the experiment group showed the increasing scores in the posttest and delayed posttest, and the guessing rate decreased. In the posttest and delayed posttest, conceptual transfer occurred to new items (in and down). The analysis of the various data demonstrated that CBI actually enhanced learners’ systematic understanding of meanings of phrasal verbs. Through the data analysis of the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, the majority of learners offered a positive feedback on CBI. Their explanations indicated that the SCOBAs were designed clearly to show the metaphorical properties of phrasal verbs and also easy for learners to understand and remember. This CBI instruction was more advantageous in that it could promote conceptual understanding, application and even long-term memory of phrasal verbs. These results had displayed a value of conceptual procedures to improve the efficiency of phrasal verb acquisition so as to furnish the system for phrasal verb teaching and acquisition.