Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Péter Antonyi: Phrasal verbs: a study and its implications for teaching methods
items include some prepositional verbs as well, matching the average language-learner's position who is quite likely to lump these apparently identical categories together, being ignorant of the complicated syntactic background. The Test Sheet (hereafter TS) contained two different texts, the first one of which being a letter for advice and an answer to it taken from Bella magazine, whereas the second one is an extract from Never Work for a Jerk by Patricia King, to be precise, I readapted these materials from Exercises on Phrasal Verbs by Jennifer Seidl. 1 5 A kind of balance was struck by using these two extracts since text one is a representative of British English while text two is of American origin. TS tested seventeen phrasal verbs also including some phrasalprepositional verbs (see TS in Appendix A). In addition to TS, I used an accompanying sheet to test the receptive knowledge (Receptive Test: RT) of phrasal verbs omitted in TS. RT comprised English sentences either to be fully translated into Hungarian or to interpret the underlined phrasal verbs in them (see RT in Appendix C). As for the actual experiment, all groups, that is, Gl, G2, G3 were tested on TS. An essential point to be made here is that none of the groups were told what sort of vocabulary items to concentrate on and each gap could be filled with any number of words of their own choice. However, I did not intend this to be a cloze test, that is, I did not mean to test students' ability to use textual cohesion. In order to put my subjects in a situation where they are surely aware of what they want to express and the focus of interest is rather the choice of language they make, I needed to present them with the Hungarian translation of the texts (see Appendix B). Each group was given approximately 50 minutes, 35 minutes of which could be devoted to the gap-filling test (TS) leaving the remaining 15 minutes for the passive test (RT) to work on. 1.4 Evaluation and points for analysis In evaluating TS, I adopted the following system of signs: OP - original phrasal verb (the same as in the original text); DP - different but appropriate phrasal verb; NOP - non-phrasal verb, but correct completion; WP - wrong phrasal verb, inappropriate use or non-existent combination; W - wrong (non-phrasal verb) completion; Seidl 1990 p. 59, 81 69
