The effect of corpus-based activities on the acquisition of phrasal verbs - A Case Study

While the corpus-based approaches have been influential in language teaching in countries with developed education systems, their influence can be hardly recognised in the EFL teaching in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore, this research study had a two-fold aim: to investigate the effect of the application of corpus-based activities (CBAs) on the acquisition of phrasal verbs among senior students of an elementary school and senior students of a high school and to determine the effect of application of corpus-based activities on the students’ motivation for learning phrasal verbs. To test the research hypotheses, an empirical case study was conducted with 50 participants in total divided into experimental and control groups. In contrast to the control groups, the experimental groups in each grade were continuously exposed to corpus-based activities over the period of a school term. The study findings were based on the comparison of the pre-exposure and post-exposure test results which were run through the Paired Samples T-test, as well as on the results of motivation questionnaires collected via a 5-point Likert scale at the beginning and the end of the study. The statistical analysis of the test results showed there was no statistically significant effect of application of the corpus-based activities on the acquisition of phrasal verbs at both levels (A2 and B2+). Additionally, there was no statistically significant effect of the application of CBAs on students’ motivation for learning phrasal verbs.