The Study On The Effects Of Frequency On The Acquisition Of Mutil-word Verbs

Recently,the paradigm of linguistics research has been undergoing a great change,and the focus of second language acquisition research also transformes from language form to language usage.The Usage-Based theories,such as frequency effect(frequency effects)have become hot research topics.Frequency means the repeative exposure to target words,including verbatim repeation and varid repeation.In the period of behaviorism,frequency was considered as a core concept of stimulus and response.The more frequent a unit of language appears,the easier it is to be strengthened and acquired.The Usage-Based theories also consider that the key of language acquisition is to build the matching and connection between form and function by language representation.According to these viewpoints,the exposure and repetition are the necessary conditions for language acquisition.The research of multi-word verbs is also a hot topic in the field of second language acquisition.Language is stored in the brain in the form of a multi-word units(mutil-word unit)of which are 70% multi-word verbs in natural language.So developing the ability of understanding and application of multi-word verbs is an important task for language teaching in high school.Frequency and multi-word verbs are both hot topics in the second language research.Many researchers have done a lot of researches in these areas respectively.However,there are a few researches combining these two areas.Multi-word verbs occupy an important position in the teaching of high school,therefore the effect of acquisition and mastery directly affect the students’ learning level,while the frequency is the key to language acquisition,so it is very necessary to combine the two areas to explore methods to improve the effect of the acquisition of multi-word verbs.This study selects 54 students from a senior high school in a county as the research subject,aiming to answer the following questions: 1.Whether the achievement of the three multi-word verbs tests are different? 2.Whether the varied repetition has an effect on English learners’ acquisition of multi-word verbs? 3.If so,is there any different effect on the acquisition of the input knowledge and productive knowledge? During the research,students are allowed to read the target multi-word verbs twice each time in different context and then take an exam about it,and the same test repeats three times.The tests’ data will be analysed by SPSS 17.0.The findings suggest that: there was significant difference among the three test scores,the frequency has a positive effect on the acquisition of multi-word verbs.However,there is no difference between the acquisition of the input knowledge and productive knowledge,while according to the statistical data of Pearson’s correlation,there is more effect on the acquisition of receptive knowledge.But the study does not reach the optimum number of input frequency for senior high school students to acquire the multi-word verbs in the experiment.This study reveals the positive correlation between the frequency effect and the acquisition of multi-word verbs,and puts forward some suggestions on the teaching of multi-word verbs.