Informal language contact and phrasal verb acquisition of study abroad students in the UK

With the changing dynamics of a globalized world, study abroad has become a prominent trend in higher education. However, many study abroad students use English to a limited extent out of class and their social networks consist of more co-national friends than host-national friends. Thus, it is worth investigating to what extent study abroad students make use of the language learning opportunities beyond the classroom and its relationship with their linguistic development. Phrasal verb (PV), as a subcategory of formulaic language, is a highly informal and ubiquitous linguistic feature used by English native speakers. It facilitates daily communication in that it sounds idiomatic and native-like. However, its polysemy also poses huge difficulty to many L2 learners (Garnier & Schmitt, 2016). Thus, the present study aims to find out whether students' social interaction in English can facilitate the acquisition of PVs. The participants of this study are over 200 international students studying in the UK for one academic year. The social network changes and PV development of students are being tracked at three time points, with a modified social network questionnaire (Dewey, Belnap, & Hillstrom, 2013), a modified language contact profile (Freed, Dewey, Segalowitz & Halter, 2004), and a modified PV test based on Smith & Murphy (2015). A few students were interviewed on their informal language contact and how they acquire PVs out of class. Based on quantitative results, there was a significant and moderate correlation between informal language contact and PV test scores. But their initial English proficiency and PV corpus frequency were the strongest predictor of their PV scores. Interview data revealed that students did not pay much attention to PVs, but they "pick up" PVs and other colloquial phrases by talking with international friends.