A Study On Phrasal Verbs In Senior High Students’ Writings

Phrasal verbs, as one significant category of the English idioms, are constituted by notional verbs and particles (adverbs or prepositions or both of them). Phrasal verbs have long been the language focus and difficult point in English teaching for the enormous number of them, and for the extensive range and flexible patterns of the application of them as well. It is precisely because the Chinese learners of English feel tough when acquiring phrasal verbs, the fluency and accuracy of their English production are severely affected. Therefore, the study on the acquisition of phrasal verbs for Chinese learners is necessary. By exploring the use of phrasal verbs in senior high students’writings mainly from the perspective of Error Analysis, this study aims to serve the phrasal verb teaching and learning in Chinese senior high schools.The study collects 465 compositions in 4 English exams of Senior One students from two classes in Xi’an and builds a small scale corpus which contains more than 55,000 words. All the use cases of phrasal verbs are recognized and compared to the Corpus of Contemporary American English to check the accuracy. After the statistical analysis, findings indicate that the errors of phrasal verbs committed by students can be classified to (1) the omission or redundancy of particles; (2) the misuse of particles or verbs, i.e., the substitution of particles or verbs; (3) the substitution of phrasal verbs, that is, the phrasal verb is wrongly replaced by another phrasal verb; (4) the improper combination of phrasal verbs and objects; (5) the deviation of semantic prosody, i.e., the unnatural output that results from the ignorance of semantic prosody of phrasal verbs; (6) the deviation of voice, that is to say, students misused the active voice and passive voice. Generally speaking, the phrasal verbs in their writings are too narrow and lack of variety.Three major causes that resulted in the errors of phrasal verbs are discussed: interlingual interference, intralingual interference and pedagogical causes. In this study, errors induced by the intralingual interference are more than those by interlingual interference.To address the issues above, two probable strategies are put forward. (1) Enhance metaphorical awareness. The meanings of phrasal verbs, notably those polysemous and idiomatic ones, largely depend on the conceptual metaphors of particles. Therefore, both English teachers and students should strengthen their metaphorical awareness. Teachers can cultivate students’ metaphor awareness and competence by encouraging them to read more English literary works and collect metaphorical expressions, guiding them to cognize the metaphorical laws and helping them take advantage of professional dictionaries of phrasal verbs. (2) Create authentic context. Teachers should master the capacity of utilizing the native English speakers’ corpora and of accessing the natural teaching materials in classroom teaching. Only when they provide an authentic context with a large number of examples, can students acquire the natural and native-like phrasal verbs.