Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs

The necessity of vocabulary teaching nowadays, especially phrasal verbs teaching, has gained more importance than before. Not only scholars, but foreign language teachers have realized that both grammar and vocabulary teaching cannot be ignored. Phrasal verbs as an important part in English language and are central in English grammar structure, there is a strong tendency in informal colloquial English to use phrasal verbs. So, EFL learners should have adequate knowledge of phrasal verbs and to master the use of such verbs is a crucial prerequisite to have fluent students. This study aimed at identifying the

99 3102 -52 -at an intermediate level avoid using phrasal verbs by replacing them with ' Latinate equivalent', for example, 'tolerate' in place of ' put up with'.
So the most problematic case and difficulty that may arise is that it is hard to know the whole meaning by combining the meaning of the phrasal verbs components(verbs and particles).This may mislead learners to learn and use such idiomatic expressions from the fact mentioned by Victoria Center (2006:3) that " Mastering the use of phrasal verbs can be a difficult challenge and overwhelming."As well as, there is the fact that our students encounter difficulties and problems in the acquisition of both semantic and collocation features of phrasal verbs.(AL-Qudah,2010:1) In spite of that phrasal verbs are usually found in our English textbooks and ESL/EFL curriculum also, but they are ignored or less used by the instructors and teachers of English as a foreign language.
In order to prevent the problems identified in this study regarding awareness of semantic use of phrasal verbs and to further improve the teaching and learning of such idiomatic expressions among Iraqi EFL learners, some recommendations are proposed

Aims of the Study:
This study aimed at identifying Iraqi EFL learners' awareness of semantic use of two-part verbs through answering the following questions: 1.Which verb do students prefer to use, one-part verbs or two-part verbs? 2. Is there a significant difference between students' awareness of onepart verbs and two-part verbs?

Limits of the Study:
This study has been limited to: -Most common phrasal verbs (have been chosen according to several linguists', specialists', and instructors' opinions in TEFL.
-Third-year college students at department of English/ College of Arts / AL-Mustansiriyah University for the academic year 2011-2012.
-A written test is used as a tool of this study .

Value of the Study :
This study can be considered valuable to : -EFL learners, Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs… Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. 32 99 3102 -54 --Stimulate teachers' thinking of English as a foreign language about ways can make learning phrasal verbs less painful.
-Attract the attention to this important area of language by syllabus designers in designing more intensive exercises textbooks to Iraqi college students to practice phrasal verbs accurately.

Definitions of Basic Terms :
Awareness : it is defined as the deliberate attempts to draw the teacher's or learner's attention specifically to the formal properties of target language.(Johnson, 2001:243) Moreover, it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's New World Dictionary as the state or ability to perceive, feel or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns.
Awareness as an operational definition is to have students identified the semantic use of two-part verbs or what is called(phrasal verbs).Semantics : as stated by Crystal ( 2003:410 ) that" it is a branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language.
Phrasal Verbs : a type of verbs consisting of a sequence of a lexical element plus one or more particles, e.g./ Come in, get up, look out for.Subtypes may be distinguished on syntactic grounds(for instance, the particles may be classified into prepositional or adverbial types.( Crystal, 2003:352) Svartvik (1966:9) agreed with Yule (2006:270) that phrasal verbs are a combination of a verb and an adverb or a prepositional particle and the new group is created whose meaning in many cases is a result of the meanings of the combined elements.
This can be supported by O' Dell and McCarthy (2004:6) who stated that " phrasal verbs are verbs that consist of a verb and a particle."Phrasal verbs as an operational definition is a two-part verb consisting of a verb followed by one or more particle which may be a prepositional or adverbial types.

What is phrasal verb ?
Phrasal verb is also known as (particle verb).English has phrasal or particle verbs, a grammatical feature that is nearly unique among world's languages, and it drives learners of English crazy.In this In these examples (a) and (b) are particle verb constructions where up is a particle, not a preposition.In (c) up the stairs is a prepositional phrase, which English requires to follow P+NP word order, so the NP+P construction of (d) is illegal. The combination of verbs and prepositions to form a single grammatical unit is rather unique to Germanic languages including English.Formed by a verb followed by one or more prepositions functioning as a particle, phrasal verbs are a common periphrastic verb form in the English language that native speakers and ESL students as well as EFL learners must learn to use correctly in both spoken and written English.For example, the following verbs are examples of phrasal verbs followed by a definition in parentheses: o act up (misbehave) o hand in (submit) o leave out (omit) As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, periphrasis is "a phrase of two or more words that together perform a single grammatical function that would otherwise be expressed by the inflection of a single word."Phrasal verbs are periphrastic because the verb and preposition work together to perform the same functions as single-word verbs.

Types of Phrasal Verbs :
Not only must English-speaking , ESL and EFL students learn to recognize the form of phrasal verbs but such students must also learn the different types of phrasal verbs.The four types of phrasal verbs in English are: 1.Intransitive.2.Non-separable transitive.3.Optionally separable transitive.

Intransitive
The first type of phrasal verb in English is the intransitive phrasal verb.Intransitive phrasal verbs are as defined as phrasal verbs that cannot or do not take objects.The prepositional functioning as a particle must directly follow the verb.

Non-separable Transitive
The second type of phrasal verb in English is the non-separable transitive phrasal verb.Transitive phrasal verbs are defined as phrasal verbs that require direct objects and may also take indirect objects.The preposition functioning as a particle must also directly follow the verb in non-separable transitive phrasal verbs.

Optionally Separable Transitive
The third type of phrasal verb in English is the optionally separable transitive phrasal verb.Optionally separable transitive phrasal verbs also require objects, but the preposition functioning as a particle can follow either the verb or the direct object.

Obligatorily Separable Transitive
The fourth type of phrasal verb in English is the obligatorily separable transitive phrasal verb.Optionally separable transitive phrasal verbs become obligatorily separable phrasal verbs when the direct object is in the form of a pronoun meaning the preposition functioning as a particle must follow the pronoun functioning as the direct object.Zampolli (1977:406) shows that the resultant combination of ' phrasal verbs ' can be classified into three categories: 1.The verb and particle more or less retain their separate meaning though they are combined to explain one thought, such as: ' get away' ( escape).

Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs…
Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. 32 99 3102 -43 -2.The verb alone retains its meaning but the meaning is modified or intensified in some way, thus, the meaning will lose much of its own signification as ' give up' ( abandon, cease trying).3.The verb and the particle both lose their separate identities; yet, they have new sense when they are linked: ' bring up' (nurse, educate).While Quirk (1983:350) observes that there are two types of ' multiword' verbs.They are ' intransitive ' and ' transitive ' phrasal verbs.The former type consists of a verb plus a particle, as shown there: -The boys are sitting down.
-Drink up slowly.
-Drink slowly up.The latter can take a direct object, like: -They turn down the light.
Some particles have literal meanings.Semantically, the difference is obvious in the following two examples: -He took in the desk.(brought inside) -He took in his father.(deceived)

Phrasal Verbs and. Prepositional verbs :
New phrasal and prepositional verbs are created in the English language to express new concepts.In this sense, search and innovations carried out in scientific and technical fields may make use of these verb and particle combinations to phrase new thought.Studies dealing with the process of word formation (Quirk et.al., 1985:60) usually disregard the study of phrasal verbs as a lexical and syntactic resource for word formation.Exception is made in the case of nominalised phrasal verbs and in those combinations which are occasionally formed by means of hyphen, that is, creativity in word formation is frequently limited to the concept of word as one lexical and structural unit ( Cubillo, 2002:2, IVS).
It seems that a preposition, verb and a particle or " a preposition adverb " share the form, but differ in the syntactic status of a preposition ( Quirk & Greenbuam, 1973:389).
Eckersley& Eckersley (1960:280) functionally distinguish between a prepositional verb and phrasal verb.The latter, as they state, does not show a relationship between the noun which follows it and any other part or word in the sentence.Besides, most of the phrasal verbs, as they add, can be replaced by a single word " verb that carries the same meaning", such as: -back up = support -run over = review -put off = postpone

Procedures :
To achieve the aims of this study, this chapter discussed the procedures that have been adopted to carry out the empirical work.More specifically, this chapter has covered the following steps: 1.

Population and Sample:
The population of the recent study is the third-year students of the department of English in the College of Arts/ Al-Mustansiriyah University for the academic year 2011-2012.The sample consisted of 80 female and male students who have randomly been chosen from this population.

Instrument of the Study:
The instrument of the study is a written test consisted of two questions, each question consisted of ten items.Question (1) focuses on both one-part and two-part verbs as a recognition part or a substitution type.The subjects have to substitute the one-part verb with their suitable meaning i.e. two-part verb that carries the same meaning.Question (2) on the other hand, focuses on two-part verbs only as a production part.The subjects are required to complete the sentences given with two-part verb (phrasal verb) to have a meaningful sentence.Each verb should be used once and never be repeated, see (Appendix A).
Tests play a fundamental and controversial role in allowing access to the limited resources and opportunities that our world provides.Besides, testing is more than a technical activity; it is also an ethical enterprise.( Davidson & Fulcher, 2007:xix) Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs… Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. 32 99 3102 -45 -Hence, the present test aims at identifying Iraqi EFL learners' awareness of semantic use of two-part verbs.
It is worth mentioning that all the items of the test were selected from various books and dictionaries concerned with phrasal verbs.Also more resources from the internet were used, see (Appendix B ).The researcher tried to cover the most common ones through the test.

Validity & Reliability of the Test:
In the respect of test validity and reliability, the test has been exposed to specialists in TEFL to decide its face validity and suitability for the students' level, and it has been agreed upon A test is valid if it measures that it is supposed to measure, i.e., the content and techniques of the test are to be relevant to the objectives (Lado, 1970:321).As defined by Richards & Schmit (2002:575), it is the degree to which a test measures what it purports measure, or can be used successfully for the purpose for which it is intended.
Reliability is as important characteristic of evaluation as validity.It refers to consistency in measuring scores; i.e., a measure is said to be reliable to the extent to which measurement error is light (Kerlinger, 1973:95).This is supported by Harris (1968:14) who stated that a test cannot measure any aspects it purports to measure unless it measure that consistently.
As far as reliability is concerned, it has been obtained by using (split halves method).This method is used to examine the internal consistency of the test.Moreover, Bachman (1990:172), referred to the division of the test into two halves to determine the extent to which scores on these two halves are consistent with each other.
Using Pearson correlation formula to correlate the two halves of scores has yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.861.Besides, Kuder-Richardson 20 equation has been used to yield a reliability coefficient of 0.77.

Items Analysis of the Test:
Items analysis is concerned with determining items difficulty and discrimination power.Items difficulty refers to the percentage of students who answered the items correctly.These items can well perform by separating the good students from poor ones ( Valette, 1977:59).

Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs…
Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S.

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After scoring these items, students' scores were arranged from the highest to the lowest score.Then the scores were divided into two halves, the highest and the lowest halves.The difficulty level for each item is calculated by using the following formula:   −       (Bachman, 1990:179) Ebel (1972:399) & Bloom (1981:95) indicated that the items of a good test should have indices of discrimination power of 0.30 or more i.e., their difficulty level varies from 30% to77%.The results showed that most of the items have a good discrimination power because their discrimination levels are above 30%.See tables (1 and 2)  Wu=the number of subjects in the upper group who answered the item incorrectly.
WL=the number of subjects in the lower group who answered the item incorrectly.
T=the total number of subjects included in the item analysis.(Bachman, 1990:55)

Analysis & Interpretation of Results:
This final section is devoted to the presentation of results, the conclusions, suggestions and recommendations based upon the obtained results.

Results related to the first aim:
To achieve the first aim of the study which is illustrated by the question " Which verb do students prefer to use, one-part verb or twopart verb?, the following percentages of each group of both verbs have been calculated and the total percentages of those who have chosen one-part verbs and those who have chosen the two-part verbs have been found out.See table (

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This means that the percentages of those who answered one-part verb is higher than percentages of those who answered two-part verb.So, the subjects prefer using one-part verb instead of two-part verb.

Results related to the second aim:
To achieve the second aim of the study which is illustrated by the following question, " Is there a significant difference between students' awareness of one-part verbs and two-part verbs?, the equation of Chi-Square has been used.And the values of the observed and expected frequencies for each group of both verbs have been calculated.See Moreover, by using Chi-square equation, the computed and tabulated values of Chi-Square have been calculated.The comparison between both values indicates that the computed Chi value is (9.466) and the tabulate one is (3.84).The computed value is much higher than tabulated Chi value with level of significance (0.05) and a degree of freedom (1).This indicates that there is statistically significant difference between students' awareness of both one-part verbs and two-part verbs and in favor of the one-part verbs which indicates also that students are more aware of one-part verbs than two-part verbs.So, the second aim is achieved.See  As shown above, it is found that third -year students / College of Arts / AL-Mustansiriyah University, have no awareness of semantic use of English phrasal verbs.
Furthermore, this can be deduced from the total number of right answers of the test (509) out of (1600) which showed unsatisfactory performance and a restricted awareness of semantic use of phrasal verbs.These results can be attributed to many reasons.One of these reasons is that our students are very weak in finding out the meaning of phrasal verbs Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs… Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. 32 99 3102 -49 -used in a sentence or a text.Teaching phrasal verb separated away from teaching vocabulary is the second major reason behind their failure in using such verbs.Besides, our students use the literal translation in order to know the meaning of phrasal verbs, i.e., to know the meaning of the phrasal verb ( give up ) for instance; students translate give as and up as as an Arabic translation, instead of translating it as stop/ .So, students prefer using onepart verb instead of two-part verb which is an indirect influence from their first language, because phrasal verb does not exist in Arabic language.This study is in harmony with the study of ( AL-Bakri, 1989), ( Salih, 2007), and ( Jaber, 2009) which attributed the weakness of college students in knowing the meaning of phrasal verbs or ( two-part verbs).

Conclusions:
Depending upon results and findings, the researcher has drawn certain conclusions: Much attention and understanding is needed for teaching and learning phrasal verbs because these verbs form a serious problem for foreign learners.Comprehension of such semantic items in English requires familiarity with instances of language that are not easily accessible.Only by extensive practice and exercises, EFL learners can familiarize utterances of such semantic items.
Iraqi EFL learners have more difficulty with two-part verbs ' phrasal verbs', this indicates that the students are unable to aware the meaning of such semantic items.Besides, complexity of the meaning is one of the most prominent factors responsible for students' errors made in this area.Our students cannot familiarize the difference between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs, this illustrates that prepositions and adverbial particles constitute a problematic area for EFL learners.They deal with prepositions as separate elements rather than as part of phrasal verbs.
Moreover, students' background knowledge of phrasal verbs is very weak, and the lack of adequate presentation of different types of these semantic items -cited above-in textbooks are reasons lead to unsatisfactory awareness of semantic use of two-part verbs.

Recommendations:
In the light of findings , some valuable and useful recommendations are made: 1.Syllabus designers should draw attention to develop more exercises that focus on the distinction between syntactic and semantic aspects and work out to find a definite strategy dealing with such aspects.
Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs… Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. 32 99 3102 -41 -2.using a particular approaches or methods such as communicative approach in teaching phrasal verbs help students become aware of the different types of phrasal verbs.3.Students should be aware of the distinction between adverbial particles and prepositions.4.Students need to familiarize themselves with phrasal verbs as well as with grammatical and lexical items.

Suggestions for Further Studies:
1.A similar study to compare between American and British phrasal verbs semantically.2.Using brainstorming technique in teaching phrasal verbs to freshman students at universities.3.A similar study about students' awareness of adverbial particles and prepositions.
4.An analytic study about the lexical aspects of American phrasal verbs.5.A survey study about the range of using all types of phrasal verbs in textbooks.
frequencies E=expected frequencies(Ferguson & Takane, 1989:221)   5.The items discrimination power: to find out the discrimination power of each item of the test: Dp=

Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs…
For example, the following italicized phrasal verbs are examples of intransitive phrasal verbs: o My car broke down on the interstate.(malfunction) o What time did you get up today?(arise) o The rain finally let up enough to take out the trash.(lessen) o Our neighbor recently passed away.(die) o The puppy woke up at the crack of dawn.(awake) For example, the following italicized phrasal verbs are examples of non-separable transitive phrasal verbs: o You should bone up on English grammar.(review) o He came across his missing sock in the dryer.(discover) o My mom dropped by my house this afternoon.(visit) o Most children look forward to Christmas morning.(anticipate) o The cat puts up with the dog.(tolerate) For example, the following italicized phrasal verbs are examples of optionally separable transitive phrasal verbs: My grandfather always mixes up the cousins.(confuse) o My grandfather always mixes the cousins up.o Have you set up the meeting.(arrange) o Have you set the meeting up? o I need to take off my wet socks.(remove) o I need to take my wet socks off.
o The Dean will call off the meeting due to the weather.(cancel) o The Dean will call the meeting off due to the weather.o Please hand out this brochure to new clients.(distribute) Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs… Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S. o Please hand this brochure out to new clients.o For example, the following italicized phrasal verbs are examples of obligatorily separable transitive phrasal verbs: Phrasal verbs are a periphrastic verb form unique to English and other Germanic languages.Both native English-speaking and ESL students must learn to recognize and use the four types of phrasal verbs to fully and correctly use the verb form in spoken and written English.
o Can you add up the bill?(total) o Can you add the bill up? o Can you add it up?o Can you add up it?(incorrect) o The student looked up the word in the dictionary.(research) o The student looked the word up in the dictionary.o The student looked it up in the dictionary.o The student looked up it in the dictionary.(incorrect) o That man ticked off that woman.(anger) o That man ticked that woman off.o That man ticked her off.o That man ticked off her. (incorrect)

Table ( 3) Results related to the first aim Iraqi EFL Learners' Awareness of Semantic Use of Two-Part Verbs…
Asst.Instr.Angham Talib S.