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English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to 4 treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these 2 retrieval groups was that 1 group studied and then retrieved items 1 at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The 2 other groups received the exercises as trial-and-error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1-week delayed posttest. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed posttest (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the posttest errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial-and-error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective.

An analysis of 44 commercially available EFL textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, the learners are likely to resort to trial-and-error and are then expected to learn from feedback. We report an experiment conducted with Japanese EFL students (N=140) in which we compare the effectiveness of such a trial-and-error method with a retrieval procedure in which students first study a set of phrasal verbs and then complete an exercise. Scores on both an immediate and a one-week delayed post-test suggest superiority of retrieval over the trial-and-error procedure, where, despite the provision of feedback, 25% of the wrong exercise responses were reproduced in the delayed post-test.

In a recent article, Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, and Webb (2014) deplored the lack of effectiveness for the learning of verb–noun collocations of a number of exercise formats which they sampled from EFL textbooks and put to the test in a series of quasi-experimental trials. The authors called for further investigations into possible improvements to such exercise formats. The present article is a response to that call. It also addresses methodological issues that may have affected Boers et al.’s (2014) findings and that rendered their conclusions tentative. In the quasi-experiment reported here, EFL learners were given fill-in-the-blank exercises on verb–noun phrases in one of three formats: (1) choose the appropriate verb, (2) complete the verb by using a first-letter cue, and (3) choose the appropriate intact phrase. A delayed post-test gauged the learners’ ability to recall the meaning of the phrases as well as their verb–noun partnership. In both regards the exercise where learners worked with intact phrases generated the best results. We then evaluate the extent to which exercises for phrase learning in 10 recent EFL textbooks accord with recommendations that follow from the quasi-experimental findings.

The proposals for action in Part IV are all principled and practical suggestions for what could be done to bring materials and their classroom use closer to what we know facilitates language acquisition and the development of communicative competence. They all involve, though, materials developers and/or teachers taking actions which they are unfamiliar with and insufficiently informed about. Certainly some action is necessary for, as chapter after chapter in this book reveals, there is too great a discrepancy between what typically happens in second and foreign language classrooms and what we know could happen to increase the chances of language learners acquiring their target language and being able to use it effectively for the purposes they need. Materials developers apply new knowledge to their development of classroom materials, and teachers to do the same in relation to the classroom use of the materials they have at their disposal and the materials which they create themselves for their learners.

This quasi-experimental study investigated the contributions of a paired-associate learning method and a semantic analysis method for enhancing Japanese EFL learners’ knowledge of phrasal verbs. In addition, since dual coding theory argues that basic image schemas of the orientation of particles create opportunities for deeper memory traces, a third treatment was included. It consisted of a semantic analysis along with basic pictures showing the direction of a trajectory in relation to a landmark. The results of the three treatments revealed participants who received the semantic analysis and those who received the semantic analysis plus basic pictures treatment outperformed the paired-associate group on the test. Based on the initial findings, it appears a semantic analysis approach is an effective teaching method that should be used to help learners overcome the confusion experienced when using phrasal verbs. 本論では準実験的研究法を使用し、日本人英語学習者の句動詞に関する語彙知識強化における、対連合学習法 (Paired-Associate Learning Method) と意味論的分析学習法 (Semantic Analysis Method) の貢献度を調査した。さらに、二重符号化理論 (Dual Coding Theory) に基づく主張、すなわち、方向性を示す副詞不変化詞の基本的イメージスキーマによってより深い記憶定着の機会が与えられるという論に基づき、第3の方法を設定した。これは、意味論的分析と共に、目標物と関係づけられた移動軌跡の方向性を示すイメージを与えるものである。以上3種類の方法を行った後、事後テストと遅延事後テストにおいて語彙記憶の保持を測定した結果、意味論的分析を受けた群および、意味論的分析に加えイメージを与えられた被験者群で、対連合学習法の被験者群を上回る結果が示された。この初期調査の結果、意味論的分析が、学習者が句動詞を使用する際に経験する混同を克服する助けとなる効果的な教授法であることが示唆された。