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

success from sheer guessing. This balance, however, is extremely difficult to strike and there is considerable danger of sentences failing to specify even the desirable meaning and therefore they could well be unfit to detect even receptive knowledge sufficiently. Anyway, guessing, as in natural language use, was allowed to function and created LI interference errors like 'kitalál'(= make up, devise) for find out and free association from the sentence like the one with bottle up rendered as 'Sokat iszik' ('S/he drinks too much'). Nevertheless, even guessing could not prevent markedly difficult (and unfamiliar) phrasal verbs from being highlighted. For instance, 'get carried away' proved to be the trickiest and caused a lot of headache in RT, too. 1.6 Results To show the capacity of the group tested in terms of receptive knowledge and the distribution of answers in the gap-filling exercise the following tables are to be studied: Table I. OP DP NOP WP w NIL PT corr. G 2.8% 6.5% 50,9% 11.1% 21.5% 7.1% 79% All tests show that students avoid using phrasal verbs although they know (or recognize) relatively large number of them. Let us reinforce this finding by a quotation from one of the sources:

1

6 Since the phrasal verb structure is a peculiarity of the Germanic languages, it should be the case that the avoidance phenomenon noted in this paper is found generally with regard to learners of English who are native speakers of non-Germanic languages other than Hebrew. The theory advanced here would indeed receive strong support should similar studies done with speakers of other non-Germanic languages confirm our findings. 1

6 Dagut and Laufer 1985 p. 78 71