Paper 002: Learnability of English Verb-Particle Combinations and the Effect of Linguistically Motivated Instruction
NEWBERY-PAYTON, Laurence (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan); FUKUDA, Sho (The University of Toyama, Japan ); MOCHIZUKI, Keiko (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)
Keywords: phrasal verb, verb-particle combination, learner corpus, SLA
Abstract
Verb-particle combinations (VPCs) have been shown to present difficulties for L2 learners (Liao & Fukuya 2004, Yoshitomi 2006, Siyanova & Schmitt 2007). Corpus studies have revealed that the difficulty of particular VPCs (Negishi, Tono & Fujita 2012) and their over- or under-use (Uchida 2012, Iio 2013, Ishii 2018) differ between L1 Japanese learners and native speakers or other learners. Acquisition studies (Yasuda 2010, Spring 2018, Nakagawa 2019) have assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that Japanese learners struggle to acquire VPCs since Japanese lacks such forms. Researchers have not attempted to explain VPCs with reference to forms in Japanese. This study examines the validity of such assumptions and the potential benefits of linguistically motivated instruction for Japanese learners. The research questions are as follows: 1. Is linguistically motivated instruction beneficial for VPC acquisition? 2. Does instruction making explicit reference to learners’ L1 have particular benefits for VPC acquisition? Three sets of audio-visual resources were created to explain VPCs with a. insights from cognitive linguistics; b. insights from contrastive linguistics; c. a mix of the two. Four groups of 1st year non-English majors participated in the study. Three groups received one of the three audio audio-visual resources, while the fourth served as a control group. All groups then memorized a list of VPCs. Results are reported for pre-, post- and delayed post-test scores. The group using the “mixed” resources showed the only significant increase in average score between pre- and delayed post-test results, suggesting the resources were effective at aiding VPC acquisition. This increase in average score was observed for 80% of learners, suggesting the wide applicability of the resources. Furthermore, the increase in scores was not restricted to items explicitly covered in the resources, suggesting learners became better able to infer the meanings of VPCs more generally.
References
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Liao, Y., & Fukuya, J. (2004). Avoidance of phrasal verbs: The case of Chinese learners of English. Language Learning, 54(2), 193–226.
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Uchida, T. (2012). Use of multiword verbs by non-advanced EFL learners: Focusing on common verb + particle combinations。東京外国語大学「コーパスに基づく言語学教育研究拠点(CbLLE)」『コーパスに基づく言語学教育研究報告』, 8, 303–323.
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Yoshitomi, A. (2006). The use of phrasal verbs by Japanese learners of English – Implications from story telling data –. In Yoshitomi, A., Umino, T., & Negishi, M. (Eds.), Readings in second language pedagogy and second language acquisition In Japanese context (pp 201–225). John Benjamins.
Presentation video
Supplementary Information
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Q&A live (Zoom) session
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This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thank you very much for this very interesting presentation!
Regarding your final points with ideas for future studies, I am looking at the language of school EFL textbooks as part of my PhD project and, though I do not have any Japanese textbooks in my corpus, I can confirm that in the 43 textbooks volume I am examining VPCs are very rare. Very few occur more than once in any textbook volume and there seems to be no consensus among textbook authors regarding which VPCs are most frequent/useful for EFL learners.
Finally, do you have any plans to share your teaching resources? I am sure they could inspire others to expand them or adapt them to other L1 backgrounds.
Thanks for your comment, it’s interesting to know that VPCs don’t appear in textbooks more generally. This study has revealed some issues I need to fix with the resources but I hope they can be shared in some form eventually.
Thank you for a wonderful talk. A couple of questions (1) 7’37’ Why did you prepare three answers: “in/into,” “out,” and “up” ? I do understand that in some cases, “in” and “into” are exchangeable but not always so. (2) You decreased the number of samples: 129 to 96. To which extent did this adjustment improve the proficiency (or rather, the lexical knowledge) gap among four groups? (It seems that the pre-test score of the Mix groups seems to be lower than the other groups) (3) 12’45” What matters here is that the score increased by 10 points even for a control group, which is perhaps due to the so-called repetition effect. If you compare the post-test scores of four groups, you may not be able to see any significant difference…. Any comments on this possibility? Anyway, this was really an interesting presentation. Thank you! (Shin ISHIKAWA, Kobe U)
Thanks for your comments here and in the Q&A session. I hope to have the chance to conduct more rigorous studies in future that address your points and make the most of the benefits of the mixed resources.
Laurence. Thank you for your reply. Let’s keep in touch!
I enjoyed your presentation. Thank you. I think it is a good idea to think about the correspondence between English phrasal verbs and Japanese compound verb expressions. But the paper did not explain in detail how the correspondence was actually defined. For instance, “pull out” can have a one-to-one correspondence with “hiki-dasu” in Japanese, but “come in” seems to have no such correspondence. For teaching purposes, it would be great to explore the possibility of using those Japanese two-word verb resources, but you might need more systematic cross-linguistic analysis for that. (Yukio Tono)
Thank you for your comments. I tried to select VPCs to cover in the resources that could be explained plausibly with reference to Japanese and/or with cognitive linguistics-style explanations. In some cases, I made reference to other forms in Japanese, like “-te kuru” for deictic VPCs like “come up”. The results suggest that the explanations may have been more successful for “out” VPCs than for the other VPCs, so I hope to revise and improve the resources going forward.