Phrasal Verbs in ELT Coursebooks Used in Turkey: A Corpus-based Analysis

Phrasal verbs are multi-word constructions which are frequently used by native speakers and necessary for fluency in English. However, they constitute one of the most problematic areas of foreign language learning due to their idiomatization, polysemous nature, and variance in meaning. Although it is difficult to teach and learn phrasal verbs, they should be taught and learned because one of the main aims of foreign language education is to prepare students to understand and use the target language fluently in real life. Utilizing two mega corpora, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study aims to determine the frequencies of phrasal verbs in coursebooks commonly used in Turkey and to point out the most frequent phrasal verbs in these two mega corpora. As a result, this study, a) compared the 100 most frequent phrasal verbs in the BNC and COCA, b) listed every single phrasal verb in the upper-intermediate level of “New Headway”, “New English File”, “Face2Face”, and “English Unlimited”, c) determined the frequency range of these phrasal verbs in the corpora, and d) provided implications for coursebook designers and teachers. As foreign language learners are sensitive to frequency effects in language learning, it can be concluded that the number of the frequent phrasal verbs should be reconsidered in the coursebooks