Which factors predict teachers’ evaluation of the difficulty and usefulness of phrasal verbs in L2 contexts?
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Suhad Sonbul
and
Dina Abdel Salam El-Dakhs
Abstract
Research examining teachers’ cognition of lexical items has flourished in the past few years. However, most of these studies focused on individual words rather than formulaic sequences. The present study aims to fill this gap through eliciting teachers’ evaluation of one type of formulaic sequences: phrasal verbs (PVs). The aim is to examine factors (frequency, opacity, and learners’ receptive and productive knowledge) that might predict teachers’ evaluation of the difficulty and usefulness of 100 PV senses. For that purpose, a survey was administered to 174 teachers. Results of generalized mixed-effects modelling showed that teachers’ assessment of both the usefulness and difficulty of PVs was predicted by sense-specific corpus frequency and receptive knowledge of these PV senses. Moreover, difficulty ratings were additionally affected by opacity and productive knowledge of PVs. We discuss these findings in relation to previous research on L2 PV knowledge and implications for L2 teaching practice.
Funding source: Prince Sultan University
Award Identifier / Grant number: RL-CH-2019/9/1
Acknowledgments
The researchers thank Prince Sultan University for funding this research project through the research lab [Applied Linguistics Research Lab - RL-CH-2019/9/1].
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Competing interest: The authors declare none.
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Supplementary Material
This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0292).
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