English Phrasal Verbs Potential in Developing Russian First-year Majors’ Foreign Communicative Competence
Dinara G. Vasbieva
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2016.09.93-103
Abstract
The paper investigates research into the great potential of English phrasal verbs in developing first-year majors’ foreign communicative competence in a non-language high school. Being one of the most dynamic and semantically rich groups of English verb lexicon in the modern English language, phrasal verbs attract students to English idiomaticity. Metaphors serve as must-have tools for teaching phrasal verbs to any ESL learner. Since understanding metaphors gives the best clue to the meanings of the phrasal verb, the ESL learner will be able to have a comprehensive understanding of the phrasal verbs under study and to remember them better. Fourteen first-year students majoring in International Finance at Financial University (Moscow) were trained in the training program "Learning English phrasal verbs through conceptual metaphors". A pre-test and an exit test were the main instruments used for the purpose of data collection. The performance-based pre-test was conducted before the training period and exit test was conducted after the training period to assess the participants. The very same set of students were made to do an exit test to assess their performance based on the training given to them in the usage of phrasal verbs. The t test for correlated data and Sandler’s A-test were done to find out, if at all, the training produced a positive effect on the ESL learners’ results.
Key Words
phrasal verbs, foreign language teaching, communicative competence, idiomatic expression, literal meaning, idiomatic meaning, idiomaticity.