Do turkish teacher traniees avoid English phrasal verbs?: A study with the students of elt department, Anadolu University

Phrasal verbs are one of the most difficult structures to master in both English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) environment. This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs (PV) by Turkish ELT teacher trainees. For the evaluation of phrasal verb production, 400 ELT students and 15 native speakers of English from University at Buffalo S.U.N.Y. /U.S.A. participated in the study. Data were collected through three different elicitation tests. To prepare test items, 20 most frequent phrasal verbs were collected from the British National Corpus and they compared with the PVs in the participants? textbooks in order to establish content familiarity, validity and reliability. 20 PVs were included in the study. Non-native participants were first, given multiple choice test and their preferences of phrasal verbs were checked at the level of recognition. Second, fill-in the blanks test items were administered to see whether the participants prefer phrasal verbs at the level of active use. Finally, ELT learners took the translation test in which the ultimate purpose was to see whether they know the meaning of each phrasal verb item collected. Native speakers, on the other hand, took multiple choice test and fill-in the blank test. vi Semantic nature of PV type, participants? year of study and different test types were considered to be three variables of the study. Data were analyzed between groups and among groups and the results showed that there wasn?t any avoidance of phrasal verbs by Turkish ELT teacher trainees. Compared within non-native participants, the results suggested that there was a significant difference among ELT groups. There wasn?t a positive correlation among groups in terms of their year of study. Scores of two different tests suggested that task effect has shown significant difference. That is, all of the participants preferred phrasal verbs less frequently in fill-in the blanks test and they used PVs in multiple choice test more often. Finally, the grade level of participants, collected phrasal verb items and test familiarity were considered to be the reasons of non-avoidance. All of the participants were advanced level of English so; lack of avoidance might be due to the participants? level of proficiency. Supporting this theory, past research has suggested that the level of avoidance decreases while the proficiency level increases. PVs were also collected from different EFL textbooks of the students, that is, they all studied the PVs in their courses. Finally, the participants multiple choice test scores were significantly higher than their fill-in the blanks test scores because they are familiar with this type of test and multiple choices test determines their performance at the level of recognition whereas fill-in the blank test determines the students? performance at the level of active use.