Teaching English Phrasal Verbs to Teenager EFL Learners of Elementary Level Through Conceptual Metaphors

Research Article

Abstract

Generally, the main goal of all studies done in the area of language learning have been to make the learning process more comprehensible. With this regard, the main motivation of this study was to examine the relationship between learning of English phrasal verbs and using conceptual metaphor theory. Secondly, the study aimed to find out whether this effect could be long-lasting. Moreover, there was a third reason for doing this project whose goal was to reveal that if participants (Iranian teenager EFL learners) would be able to generalize what they had learned about the meaningful structure of phrasal verbs during the treatment to new situations. To do so, 25 participants, Iranian teenager EFL learners of Inventive House of English institute of Mashhad, were selected randomly. They had been English learners for at least two years. They spent eighteen 90-minute sessions in one term. In the first session, they took a pretest to assess their knowledge of 30 phrasal verbs based on what they had learned through traditional method instructions. Then, during the next 16 sessions learners were provided with conceptual metaphor theory viewpoint toward phrasal verb structure. For this purpose, some SCOBAs (which are simple images representative of the mental images of these structures), were used to activate learners’ image schemata regarding the meaning of these phrasal verbs. The last session was the time of posttest. The results revealed that there was a significant relationship between employing conceptual metaphor theory in teaching phrasal verbs and efficient learning of them.