EFL learners’ Awareness of Decontextualized and Contextualized of Some English Phrasal Verbs

Abstract

Phrasal verbs belong to fixed expressions and they are well-established, very popular idioms and compromise an integral part of English language .The current paper tackles EFL learners' awareness in determining the correct meaning of some contextualized and decontextualized phrasal verbs. It tries to explore the effect of context as an approach to guess the correct meaning of phrasal verbs. It hypothesizes that context plays an important role in helping students to overcome difficulties they face and hence helps them make inferences to realize the correct meaning of phrasal verbs.  In order to test the validity of this hypothesis, (6) English phrasal verbs have been incorporated in two multiple choice tests and then given to (50) EFL learners of English at their 3rd year/stage of study at the English department to choose the correct meaning of phrasal verbs. In the first test , the phrasal verbs were decontextualized and students were asked to choose the correct meaning of them  .In the second test , the same students were asked to  choose the correct meaning of the same phrasal verbs within their contexts (contextualized). Then, both tests were compared to find out the effect of context. The results show the students' ability in making use of the context and determine the correct meaning of phrasal verbs. This paper concludes that context is a very important factor in helping and enabling EFL learners to make inferences of the meanings of contextualized phrasal verbs.