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

Another important observation is that they tend to be largely controlled by their native language not only to comprehend but to create phrasal verbs in the target language. Table II. (three classifications) Correct Incorrect PhV Non-PhV Corr. PhV Incorr. /Non-PhV G 60.1% 39.9% 28.2% 71.8% 9.3% 90.7% This demonstrates that a relatively high level of correct performance in general and a good knowledge of phrasal verbs do not necessarily correlate. 2 Implications As the study has pointed out students clearly tend to avoid using phrasal verbs and feel much more at ease with choosing NOP solutions. The vast influence that LI interference exerts on the acquisition of phrasal verbs should not be proven any further. In addition, L2 intuition is another important component to direct the production of phrasal verbs mostly, when guesses are made by recalling vague memories of certain combinations (sometimes they are non-existent) that are supposed to convey the desired meaning. Guessing of some kind was generally the main source in 'creating' phrasal verbs. This study, by principle, cannot determine whether a correct phrasal verb was the result of guessing or not, so it must fall back on WPs to analyse the way guessing works. Studying WPs, however, a simple question arises: which part of the phrasal verb is remembered more successfully in general? The verb or the particle? The present study has evidence both for and against either case, but as it is not the immediate objective of this paper and transfer has the most subtle influence on shaping phrasal verbs, this question needs considerable research to be fairly answered or there might not even be a general answer. Nevertheless, avoidance of phrasal verbs by EFL students and their tremendous frequency in target language use (English) evidently challenges the traditional teaching methods regarding this field of vocabulary. The traditional methods tended to imply that the verbs randomly select particles and hence, there is no system at all. The most decisive argument against this implicit hypothesis is that people utilize their knowledge of other combinations and inevitably use some sort of analogies when they create 72