Weighing Up Exercises on Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial‐and‐Error Practices

Abstract

English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language (EFL) textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to 4 treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these 2 retrieval groups was that 1 group studied and then retrieved items 1 at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The 2 other groups received the exercises as trial‐and‐error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1‐week delayed posttest. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed posttest (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the posttest errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial‐and‐error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective.

Assessing pedagogical approaches to foster the comprehension and retention of new L2 Spanish idioms

“…Therefore, incorrect guessing or inferencing may actually have negative effects on the learning of new words (Carpenter et al, 2012;Laufer, 1997;Elgort, 2017;Warmington & Hitch, 2014). The same outcomes have been found for the learning of new collocations and phrasal verbs (Boers et al, 2014;Strong & Boers, 2019a, 2019b.…”

“…It is commonly believed that immediate corrective feedback will override original memory traces (Kornell, Hays & Bjork, 2009;Potts & Shanks, 2014) -a belief that is widely applied in teaching practice-but there is evidence that incorrect guesses or inferences can lead to erroneous memory traces that resurface in post-tests even after the provision of corrective feedback (Elgort, 2017;Strong & Boers, 2019a, 2019b. We believe, however, that the positive effects of corrective feedback may be enhanced by providing learners not only with the correct meaning of an idiom, but also with information about its semantic motivation.…”

Perfecting Practice

“…Strong and Boers () compared groups of Japanese university students learning English phrasal verbs under different conditions. Participants were either taught verbs with their particles before engaging in practice activities or they did the practice through a process of trial and error.…”

Empirical Feasibility of the Desirable Difficulty Framework: Toward More Systematic Research on L2 Practice for Broader Pedagogical Implications

“…For instance, Nakata and Suzuki () demonstrated that interleaved practice led to a significantly lower proportion of correct responses during the learning phase (77.0%) than blocked practice (87.2%). Similarly, Strong and Boers () reported that the retrieval condition led to more successful performance during learning (88%) than the trial‐and‐error condition (18%). Kasprowicz, Marsden, and Sephton () did not find a statistically significant difference between long and short spacing in learning phase performance (7‐day: 79.6%, 3.5‐day: 82.5%).…”