the effect of conceptual metaphor awareness on learning phrasal verbs by iranian intermediate efl learners

The ability to comprehend and produce phrasal verbs, as lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together, is an important part of language learning. this study investigates the effect of „conceptual metaphor awareness‟, as a newly developed technique in cognitive linguistics, on learning phrasal verbs by iranian intermediate efl learners. to meet this objective, two intact homogeneous (in terms of their knowledge of english phrasal verbs) groups of iranian intermediate efl learners were included. both groups were given a pretest on phrasal verbs designed by the researchers. then, in a 5-week instructional period the phrasal verbs were presented with traditional method of explanation and sentence examples to the control group, without providing any explicit explanation about the metaphorical nature of the meaning of phrasal verbs. in the experimental group, the phrasal verbs were presented with an explicit emphasis on the metaphorical nature of the meanings of phrasal verbs contributed by their particles. two weeks after the last instructional session, a post test on target phrasal verbs (designed by the researchers) was given to the subjects in order to compare the performance of the subjects in the two groups in terms of guessing the meanings of the phrasal verbs based on the instructional methods they had been provided with. the results showed that the experimental group had significantly outperformed the control group; accordingly the outcome of this study yielded positive results on teaching phrasal verbs with cognitively oriented methods like conceptual metaphor awareness.