The importance of lexical acquisition in SLA: A case study on phrasal verbs

Abstract

The acquisition of vocabulary has often been neglected in the field of linguistics. Only in the last decades the acquisition of new words has become a new branch in SLA studies supported by theories and approaches for the teaching of vocabulary to EFL students. The aim of my final work is to point out the strategies of teaching English lexis to Italian students with a B1/B2 level. The theoretical findings will be tested in a real case study in relation to the effectiveness of some selected methods of lexis teaching. Learning the lexis is one of the hardest challenges that students have to face in order to master a foreign language. At the same time it is the crucial basis for building a personal vocabulary. Thus the importance of lexis has pushed me to focus my attention on this topic and particularly on the strategies that permit learners to improve their knowledge of phrasal verbs. In the first two chapters I describe the process of lexis and, in particular, phrasal verbs acquisition through the literature review. In the third chapter a short comparative study of the lexis teaching methods is conducted, based on the selection of the most commonly used textbooks in Italy. A personal case study on phrasal verbs teaching and assessment completes the entire research project in order to verify the success of the approaches and methods applied to a group of Italian students. The final chapter summarises the results of the case study, points out its limitations and makes some proposals for further research.