Experimental Study On The Influence Of Concept-based Instruction On The Acquisition Of Phrasal Verbs In Senior High School

Phrasal verbs(PVs)are one of the most distinctive features of present-day informal English(Downing,2015).They have formed a very important part of language resources in communicative contexts.Due to their productivity and complexity,they pose a challenge to English teaching and learning.Recently,some scholars,inspired by the sociocultural theory,put forward that conceptual internalization promotes learners’ understanding of language structures.Cognitive linguists also hold that our world and thoughts are all based on conceptual systems and people understand the abstract and unfamiliar concepts on the basis of their knowledge of concrete and familiar concepts.In the light of these theories,concept-based instruction(CBI)advocates that concepts can be seen as the minimal pedagogical unit,and schemas or models as physical tools help learners better understand concepts,put concepts into verbal form,and thus acquire language knowledge deriving from the concept.However,there are few experimental studies on the effects of CBI on the acquisition of phrasal verbs in Chinese senior high school.Therefore,this research explores the effects of CBI on the acquisition of PVs in senior high school.The research questions are as follows:(1)Does CBI facilitate the acquisition and retention of receptive knowledge of PVs?(2)Does CBI facilitate the acquisition and retention of productive knowledge of PVs?The research adopts the experimental method to carry on the contrast research.91 students of two parallel classes from a high school in Heyuan City were selected as subjects,with 46 in the experimental class(EG)and 45 in the control class(CG).The experiment was conducted over a six-week period.And the target PVs are all from the textbook used by the students.Both EG and CG were taught by the same teacher with two different teaching methods.CBI was adopted in EG,while the conventional teaching method,Presentation,Practice,Production,was adopted in CG.The research instruments include tests and interviews.And the tests(receptive knowledge test and productive knowledge test of PVs)are adapted from the test of Schmitt and Readwood(2011).The data of pre-test,post-test and delayed post-test were analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The results of the paired-sample t-test and independent-sample t-test show that teaching PVs based on CBI does facilitate the acquisition and retention of receptive knowledge of PVs.Moreover,CBI also promotes the acquisition and retention of productive knowledge.To sum up,CBI in PV teaching can effectively help students acquire and keep the PVs knowledge.The reason may lie in three factors.Firstly,systematic learning of language concepts improves understanding and longer retention of PVs.Secondly,cognitive linguistic interpretation of particles and PVs is helpful to acquire comprehensive knowledge of PVs.Thirdly,materialized things in CBI can better serve as a mediational tool for learners to mediate the language concepts with their cognitive system.This study brings some enlightenment to PV teaching in senior high school,compared to the conventional teaching method in which students learn the word by rote and practice lots of translation.Teachers can guide students to explore the intrinsic motivation of PVs’ semantic formation and learn the concept of PVs systematically by materialization and communicative activities,thus archive more vocabulary knowledge.