Phrasal verbs in undergraduate writing : a focus on South African second-language students

Abstract

Global research into phrasal verb use suggests that second-language students struggle to attain competence in its use although it is prevalent in English and so key to English proficiency. The phrasal verb is a multi-part verb consisting of a verb proper and particle. This research study set out to discover whether this trend was also observable among South African second-language students, and, furthermore, to examine the general patterns of phrasal verb use by South African students, including first-language students. Two corpora, SAMuLCAT (comprising student writing samples from North-West University and the University of Pretoria) and WITS (comprising student writing samples from the University of the Witwatersrand) were used in the study, separated into first- and second-language subcorpora.

Phrasal verb use was approached from various angles to gain a detailed perspective on this grammatical feature. Investigation centred around phrasal verb occurrence and distribution, frequently used phrasal verbs, preference for phrasal verbs or their one-word synonyms, and phrasal verb error occurrence.

The results showed that second-language students use phrasal verbs more than first-language students, and that first-language students prefer one-word synonyms more than second-language students. Many high-frequency phrasal verbs were used by both groups of students. Phrasal verb distribution showed that a small percentage of phrasal verbs was used often, while the rest were used once only. More unnatural PV use was found in second-language than in first-language student writing which suggests that L2 students in particular would benefit from workshops on the appropriate use of phrasal verbs and their one-word alternatives.