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Phrasal verbs, though very common in the English language, are acknowledged as difficult to acquire by non-native learners of English. The present study examines this issue focusing on two learner groups from different mother tongue backgrounds, i.e. Lithuanian and Polish advanced students of English. The analysis is conducted based on Granger’s (1996) Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis methodology, investigating the Lithuanian and Polish components of the International Corpus of Learner English, as well as the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays. The results obtained in the study prove that both learner groups underuse phrasal verbs compared with native English speakers. It is concluded that this could be due to the learners’ limited repertoire of phrasal verbs as they employ significantly fewer phrasalverb types than native speakers. Furthermore, it is noticed that learners face similar stylistic, semantic and syntactic difficulties in the use of this language feature. In particular, the analysis shows that such errors might be caused by native language interference, as well as the inherent complexity of phrasal verbs. The present study not only helps to account for the challenges that are common to those language groups which lack phrasal verbs in their linguistic repository, but also provides insights into the understanding of advanced learner language.

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The paper is an attempt to give an overview of several periods in the development of English Studies in Lithuania from its establishment as an independent academic discipline in 1923 until now 1 .The notion of english studies, as has been noted by E. Balz (2000, 2), "is surprisingly difficult to define and it means different things in different places. In some countries, especially English-speaking ones, 'English' refers exclusively to the study of literature(s), not only English, but also American, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, Black British and (as the euphemism goes) emerging ones. (…) Elsewhere, literature and linguistics are both integral parts of 'English' and, as this tends to be the case where English is a foreign language, applied linguistics and language learning will, to different degrees, belong to it as well".It is also claimed (Haas 2000, 361) that in the former Eastern Bloc, linguistics, language teaching and methodology tended to have somewhat better chances than literary scholarship.another point that should be made clear at the very beginning is that it was only late that English Studies found full academic recognition. Here are a few dates of the establishment of the first chairs in Europe: