The use of English phrasal verbs in American spoken corpora

In this study, the use of phrasal verbs (PVs) by native speakers in American spoken corpora is investigated. More specifically, a compiled corpus of conversations from academic setting and a compiled corpus of informal conversations are compared. The overall results showed that speakers in both settings seemed to rely on a rather small set of PVs in their speech although the ranking for the top 15 common PVs for both corpora was not related to each other (p > .005). Relying on the identification of the most frequent PVs across two large corpora samplings from spoken American English, the findings of the current study inform EFL/ESL teachers and material developers about what to include in their syllabi to help learners with the acquisition and use of PVs.