A multimodal analysis of phrasal verbs in OpenCourseWare lecture video clips: Insights for listening comprehension in English language teaching

It is well known that understanding phrasal verbs can be quite challenging for L2 learners of English due to varying degrees of semantic opaqueness and polysemy. Difficulties may be exacerbated when the first language of L2 learners is one in which such composite structures are not present. This chapter aims to explore how co-occurring non-verbal resources, such as gesturing and prosodic signals, may facilitate understanding of phrasal verbs through replication, reinforcement, and integration of the verbal meaning. The analysis is based on a dataset of video clips extracted from OpenCourseWare lectures available from the institutional websites and/or YouTube. The methodological approach combined corpus software to first identify phrasal verbs and multimodal annotation software to then display and analyze co-occurring non-verbal cues. The results indicate that phrasal verbs together with co-occurring extra-linguistic features have a synergistic relationship which may assist L2 learners in understanding their meanings, particularly in cases of semantic opacity.