Experimental studies of teaching English phrasal verbs—From the Cognitive Perspective

This paper provides experimental evidence suggesting that for adult mid-level Chinese English learners teaching one construction, i.e. "V+down", with several metaphorical concepts by combining Cognitive Linguistic approach (CLA) with meaning guessing method is more effective than that by CLA. Experiment 1 tested the participants taught by CLA and the participants taught by the traditional instruction method in teaching one construction respectively. There are not any significant differences between them in performance. Experiment 2 tested the participants taught by combining CLA and meaning guessing method by employing the teaching materials of Experiment 1. The post-tests show that performance of participants taught by CLA and meaning guessing method improved dramatically and much better than those taught by CLA. This paper also argues that teaching one construction with appropriate amount of related metaphorical concepts at a time is more effective than teaching several constructions with one or more metaphorical concepts each for adult foreign language learners without language environment.