The effectiveness of group, pair and individual output tasks on learning phrasal verbs

ABSTRACT

This study measured the effectiveness of three tasks (cloze, editing and writing) on the learning of phrasal verbs for students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 72 low-to-intermediate EFL learners were recruited. This study employed pre- and post-test designs. The performance of the learners who completed the three tasks individually was compared with that of the learners who completed the same tasks in pairs or in groups. The results indicated that the learners who participated in group work achieved a larger gain of the knowledge of the phrasal verbs than doing the tasks in a pair; however, tasks completed in pairs led to better performances than individual work. The writing task yielded the best learning scores, followed by the editing task and finally, the cloze task. In addition, the writing task resulted in the greatest number of instances of metalinguistic or form-focused feedback. Implications for teaching and learning phrasal verbs are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• feedback
• interaction
• output
• phrasal verb learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to Ellis (2003), a task has four main characteristics: (1) A task involves a primary focus on (pragmatic) meaning. (2) A task has some kind of ‘gap’. (3) The participants choose the linguistic resources needed to complete the task. (4) A task has a clearly defined, non-linguistic outcome. Therefore, one reviewer suggested that the three tasks in the present study should be called ‘activities’ or ‘exercises’. However, Nassaji and Tian (2010) claimed similar exercises as tasks in their study.