The Error in Trial and Error: Exercises on Phrasal Verbs

An analysis of 44 commercially available EFL textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, the learners are likely to resort to trial-and-error and are then expected to learn from feedback. We report an experiment conducted with Japanese EFL students (N=140) in which we compare the effectiveness of such a trial-and-error method with a retrieval procedure in which students first study a set of phrasal verbs and then complete an exercise. Scores on both an immediate and a one-week delayed post-test suggest superiority of retrieval over the trial-and-error procedure, where, despite the provision of feedback, 25% of the wrong exercise responses were reproduced in the delayed post-test

Weighing up Exercises on Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial-And-Error Practices

EFL textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these two retrieval groups was that one group studied and then retrieved items one at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The two other groups received the exercises as trial-and-error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1-week delayed post-test. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed test (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the post-test errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial-and-error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective

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