Phrasal verbs in academic writing : a corpus-based study of French-speaking and Norwegian learners of English

If phrasal verbs (PVs hereafter) unmistakably represent a very important aspect of the English language, they also appear as one of the most problematic for foreign learners to master. Due to their semantic and syntactic complexity, in addition to their incongruity and their unpredictability, phrasal verbs result in a major challenge for English Language Instruction, as well as in a real struggle for learners, and may often lead to avoidance or misuse. However, despite their inherent difficulties, PVs remain an essential component for learners to try and master; hence the need to include them in the curriculum. This holds true not only because of their high frequency in language use, but also because PVs carry a wide array of meanings and functions (Garnier and Schmitt, 2015: 648). Previous literature on the topic has shown that learners tend to avoid using PVs whenever a single-word equivalent is available. However, a much more mixed picture comes out learner corpus studies, which actually show that some learners display an overuse of PVs, while some others display an underuse of PVs, by comparison to their native counterparts (Waibel 2007). This study aims to investigate upper-intermediate and advanced French-speaking and Norwegian learners of English’ use of PVs in academic writing. Phrasal verbs are looked into with regard to a specific genre which has not been focussed on much in previous literature, i.e. the academic register. Our investigation is carried out on the basis of four corpora/subcorpora, i.e. the French and the Norwegian subsection of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase learner (VESPA) corpus, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and the Louvain Corpus of Research Articles (LOCRA). This choice of data allows for a multi-way comparison between two different groups of learners, the novice native speakers and the expert writers. The main objective of this study is to discover whether French-speaking and Norwegian learners of English use the same phrasal verbs as their native and expert counterparts in this particular genre, and whether they use them in a similar way, for instance in terms of frequency, contexts of use, and structural patterns.