A Descriptive study about the use of phrasal verbs in EFL students’ narrative writings
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Date
2020
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Publisher
Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
The present dissertation is carried out to investigate the teachers' opinions and teaching techniques regarding Phrasal Verbs (PVs) in the Algerian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class. Besides, it investigates whether or not third year LMD students at L'arbi Ben M'hidi University - Oum El Bouaghi - use PVs in their academic writing, i. e., how many PVs they use and whether they use them correctly or not. First, since part of the work is about teachers' perceptions, a questionnaire was administered to 15 teachers of grammar and written expression at the English Department in the same university. Secondly, the other part of the study is about the students' performance regarding PVs in formal writing. In fact, the students were asked to write narrative essays of five paragraphs about the embarrassing moments that they have experienced in their life in general. The results show that 80% of teachers believe that FPVs almost never appear in the students' written production, which is a negative point and should be worked on. Moreover, regarding their performance with PVs in formal writing, EFL students, as 80% of the selected sample of teachers believe, did not use any FPVs in their essays. Besides, the majority of the PVs they included were informal and used inappropriately. This confirms our hypothesis that 3rd year LMD students use nearly no formal phrasal verbs in their academic writing. As a consequence, the EFL learners' awareness concerning these grammatical complexities, otherwise known as multi word verbs, should be raised; they need more exposure and practice to use them correctly and to fully master them to show their competence.
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Keywords
Phrasal verb, English academic writing