JALT2025 - Tokyo

Using Corpus Data to Help Students Learn Multi-Word Verbs

Nov 2, 2025, 1:45 PM

30m

National Olympics Memorial Youth Center / 国立オリンピック記念青少年総合センター

Research-oriented Presentation (30-minutes) Language Classroom Content Room 412

Speaker

MART CHRISTINE JOHNSTON (Takushoku University)

Description

This pedagogical approach encourages students to guess intervening words in multi-word verbs (MWVs) and compare their guesses with data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This helps learners identify patterns in native speaker usage. The presentation explores how trigrams and 4-grams in the top 150 most frequent phrasal verbs (PVs) reveal the impact of intervening words on frequency and use, focusing on separable vs. non-separable PVs and their influence on language comprehension.

Summary

This pedagogical approach encourages students to guess intervening words in multi-word verbs (MWVs) and compare their guesses with data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This helps learners identify patterns in native speaker usage. The presentation explores how trigrams and 4-grams in the top 150 most frequent phrasal verbs (PVs) reveal the impact of intervening words on frequency and use, focusing on separable vs. non-separable PVs and their influence on language comprehension.