A Study On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of Polysemous Phrasal Verbs From A Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Phrasal verbs, which occupy a vast number in English, are composed of verbs andparticles. They make up a high proportion in high school curriculum, so mastering phrasalverbs is very important for high school students. However, due to their multiple senses,phrasal verbs become very difficult for English learners. They think the multiple senses ofphrasal verbs are unrelated. They often learn phrasal verbs by rote or sometimes infer themeanings through the context. However, rote learning is ineffective and inferring sensesthrough the context has its limitations.Cognitive linguistic researches on polysemy have shown that different meanings of onepolysemous word are interrelated and extended from a core meaning. The motivations of theextention are metaphor, metonymy, and image schema transformations. So this study tries toapply the research findings of polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics to phrasal verbs acquisition.In recent years, many domestic and foreign experts have applied cognitive theories to secondlanguage vocabulary acquisition, including the acquisition of phrasal verbs. But there aresome limitations: most previous studies focus on learners’ use of phrasal verbs, and fewscholars put their attention to empirical studies on applying cognitive linguistic theories to theteaching of phrasal verbs. And there is no empirical study that inquiries whether theawareness of the motivations of senses extensions can help high school students improve theirability to acquire and use the target phrasal verbs.With the sophomores of senior high school as the subjects, this paper conducts anempirical study to prove that awareness of the motivations of sense extensions of phrasalverbs is beneficial to learners’ acquisition and production of target phrasal verbs. The mainresearch questions are as follows:1) What’s the situation of phrasal verbs acquisition amonghigh school students?2) Do the cognitive motivations of sense extensions influence thereception and production of phrasal verbs of senior high school students?3) In what aspectsdoes this cognitive teaching method influence students’ acquisition of phrasal verbs?This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect statistics and thenmakes an objective analysis with the instrument of SPSS (13.0). In the end, this paper putsforward the following findings:1) The majority of the subjects admit that it is difficult forthem to remember the multiple senses of a phrasal verb and distinguish one from another.They don’t know that the multiple meanings of a phrasal verb are interrelated.2) Thecognitive motivations of sense extensions do effectively improve the acquisition of Englishphrasal verbs of senior high school students. And this new cognitive teaching method can be applied into phrasal verbs teaching in senior high school.3) This new cognitive teachingmethod improves students’ acquisition of phrasal verbs due to the following aspects: First,this method is timesaving which enables students to spend less time in remembering targetphrasal verbs. Second, this cognitive method is interesting and new for the students, whicharouses students learning interest. Third, this method makes it easy to distinguish one phrasalverb from another and their accuracy rate has improved. In the meantime, the negative aspectsof this method are as follows: first, this new method is unfamiliar for them, which needsstudents to spend some extra time in grasping it. Second, this method is still boring for somestudents. They do not want to switch to another method unless it is particularly attractive.