Korean University Students'Knowledge in English Phrasal Verbs

Korean University Students'Knowledge in English Phrasal Verbs

Recent years have seen a considerable growth in the area of L2 vocabulary acquisition studies. Many of these studies focus on lexical items in a broader social interactional context of language. referred to as lexical chunks. Phrasal verbs are a type of lexical chunks and consequently share much of their linguistic and functional features. This paper aims both to review some theoretical points relevant to English phrasal verbs and to examine how much Korean university students know about and how well they can use the phrasal verbs. 89 university students were asked to complete a test on 25 English phrasal verbs. The test consists of three parts: self-reporting about knowledge level on the items. supplying their understanding in the form of a Korean translation or an English synonym, and producing the items in a sentence. The results of the study show that Korean university students are very poor at English phrasal verbs. In particular. they hardly have the ability to produce them in semantically and grammatically correct sentences. Familiarity and semantic transparency seem to be major factors influencing their ability to understand and produce English phrasal verbs.