Problems of learning and teaching PVs

PVs remain a major challenge for L2 learners because no really accurate description of

them is available. They have been taken as a serious learning hurdle and many

researchers have pointed out where the difficulties lie (McArthur, 1979, 1989). For

example, De Cock (2005:ls16-18)⁠ summarises the common problems of PVs for

learners: avoidance, style deficiency, semantic confusion, lack of collocational

awareness, using idiosyncratic phrasal verbs and syntactic error. Avoidance is one of

these problems that make PVs notorious for foreign language learners. PVs have been

found to be ‘avoided’ by learners in many studies (Dagut & Laufer, 1985; Hulstijn &

Marchena, 1989; Laufer & Eliasson, 1993; Liao & Fukuya, 2004; Siyanova &

Schmitt, 2007)⁠. However, it is not possible to assign absence definitely to the strategy

of avoidance in a corpus-based study, thus no further details will be discussed here.

Other studies conducted in light of learners’ difficulty also reveal several general

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are widely preferred to idiomatic PVs across different L1 backgrounds. Secondly,

learners tend to use PVs less frequently than do native speakers. Thirdly, the structural

difference between L1-L2 (some languages do not have VPCs) will cause problems for

learners. Moreover, difficulties may result from “polysemy, contextual and

collocational restrictions, phrasal verb combinations, grammatical environment”

(Lennon, 1996). The multiplicity of senses of PVs is also recognised as a hurdle for

learners in Cornell (1985)⁠. Furthermore, from a didactic perspective, Side

(1990:144-145)⁠ lists eight reasons for students’ resistance to learning PVs:

1. Confusion of combining the verb and the particle 2. Polysemy of PVs

3. Opacity of the meanings of idiomatic PVs

4. Preference of a synonymous latinate one-word verb to a two-word PV 5. The particle seems random

6. Confusion of transitivity and separability 7. Register/appropriacy

8. First language interference

Overall, it can be predicted that learners may have problems on two levels. The first

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to express the right meaning and the idiomaticity (meaning opacity) of the PV. The

second is the collocation of the PV and its direct collocates. The selection of

appropriate collocates could become a difficulty for learners, whether they are

semantically or arbitrarily determined. These two levels will be discussed in the

following paragraphs.

For the first level, idiomaticity has been noticed as the marked semantic feature of

phrasal verbs; however, this issue has not attracted attention in equal weight to its

importance. Especially for learner language studies, idiomaticity is not a peripheral

area in studies which focus on phrasal verbs, particularly when the problem of

learnability is involved, as stated by Waibel (2007)⁠ :

It is desirable to investigate this important aspect of phrasal verbs, especially in view of the fact that qualified statements about the learnability of phrasal verbs have to be based on a comparison of performance as regards transparent and idiomatic phrasal verbs. (Waibel, 2007:165)

_⁠

PVs have been found to be avoided or underused by learners of many first language

backgrounds (Dagut & Laufer, 1985; Liao & Fukuya, 2004)⁠. In these studies,

idiomaticity is usually taken as an important factor to explain why learners fail to be

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more idiomatic/figurative PVs will result in more difficulty for learners. However, this

may be true only when the learners are examined on their receptive knowledge. In other

words, it makes sense to say that learners have no way to know an idiomatic PV which

has never been encountered before, but once the sense of the PV is revealed to them, the

meaning can be easily acquired. However, this is not enough; they also need to know

the usages in different contexts.

The second level involves another problem of learning PVs: learners are not

sensitive to the collocations, especially to those which are restricted to some degree. In

other words, they have less difficulty using those which are extremely restricted or

completely free (Howarth, 1998; Nesselhauf, 2005)⁠. An important finding of

Nesselhauf’s (2005) work is that it is not the most restricted collocations that are most

difficult for learners but the combinations of less restriction, namely the less restricted

collocations which the node word can take more collocates. The example of the more

restricted combination given by Nesselhaulf (2005) is pay attention, in contrast to the

less restricted combination such as perform, which can collocate with an experiment, a

miracle, a ceremony, etc. A semantic constraint specifies the conditions which its

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learners. We know that the collocates of the PV used in one sense are constrained in the

same semantic field, but the semantic restrictions are hard to capture.

The discovery of these learning problems has led to a change in the teaching

paradigm of PVs. As mentioned earlier, previous studies have mainly addressed the

issue of the syntax problems, but only a little work has been undertaken empirically to

explore the acquisition of syntactic rules (Sawyer, 1999). Regarding the teaching

method, teaching grammatical rules and form-meaning mappings explicitly to learners

has been shown to be effective (Gallagher, 2006; Thibeau, 1999); however, the

teaching of PVs has been criticised as involving an overemphasis on syntactic

structures, so the inclusion of semantic features has been advocated instead (Dalle,

1983). Researchers have commonly proposed teaching PVs according to their

regularities, fixedness or categorisation (Smidowicz, 1997). By doing so, their lexical

nature is highlighted. As a result, some scholars⁠ have proposed teaching PVs using a

lexical approach (see Lewis, 1993). Also, the importance of learning PVs by their

contexts, semantic fields, etc. has been addressed by Klein (1995)⁠. The roles of

particles and contexts have been noticed by Side (1990:151) as well, and he emphasises

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contextualisation. In addition, researchers often suggest learning PVs by using

authentic texts (Wyss, 2003)⁠.