Integrating Corpus Insights in Representation of Phrasal Verbs for ESL Learners: A Case Study of NCERT English Textbooks

ABSTRACT The present study examines the representation of phrasal verbs in the English textbooks of classes 1 to 3 published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) of India. The focus is to point out whether the representation of phrasal verbs adheres to the corpus findings of the phrasal verbs frequent in the English language, including the syntactic and semantic structure they exhibit. The methodology adopted is a corpus-based content analysis wherein the findings are compared with their representation in the British National Corpus (BNC). The study demonstrates that the representation is based more on intuition than empirical evidence, and the transitive structure with literal meaning is a more favoured construction. The study suggests that teachers and curriculum designers can employ corpora resources in addition to identify the areas of language teaching that may pose challenges for the learners.