Instructional Effects of Positive and Negative Evidence on Prepositional/Phrasal Verbs

An experiment in Japan investigated the kind of input that is effective in enabling college-level students of English as a Second Language to formulate grammar, specifically prepositional and phrasal verbs. A grammaticality judgment test and a translation test were given to 131 Japanese university students, who were divided into three treatment groups and one control group. The treatment groups were taught these verbs with different approaches: (1) providing positive evidence (grammatically correct examples); (2) providing examples of both grammatical and ungrammatical forms (positive and negative evidence); and (3) providing individualized error correction to each student. Subjects were then tested immediately after the treatment, 1 month later, and 1 year after treatment. Results indicate that the second treatment was most beneficial over 1 month. Over the period of a year, provision of positive evidence did not have a significant effect on grammatical knowledge, and it had only an immediate effect in translation. In addition, it was easier to make a correct grammaticality judgment on phrasal verbs with the pronoun "it" than on lexical phrasal verbs. Contains 46 references. (MSE)