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The Error in Trial and Error: Exercises on Phrasal Verbs
Author(s) -
Strong Brian,
Boers Frank
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.1002/tesq.478
Subject(s) - set (abstract data type) , error analysis , psychology , computer science , linguistics , mathematics , programming language , philosophy
An analysis of 44 commercially available English as a foreign language ( EFL ) textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, learners are likely to resort to trial and error and are then expected to learn from feedback. The authors report an experiment conducted with Japanese EFL students ( N = 140) that compared the effectiveness of such a trial‐and‐error method with a retrieval procedure in which students first study a set of phrasal verbs and then complete an exercise. Scores on both an immediate and a 1‐week delayed posttest suggest superiority of retrieval over the trial‐and‐error procedure, where, despite the provision of feedback, 25% of the wrong exercise responses were reproduced in the delayed posttest.