The Impact of Information-Gap Tasks on Improving Iranian EFL Learners’ Knowledge of Phrasal Verbs

Sabzalipour, Batoul; Shams, Fatemeh

doi:10.22080/iselt.2025.29711.1113

The Impact of Information-Gap Tasks on Improving Iranian EFL Learners’ Knowledge of Phrasal Verbs

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Rahman Institute of Higher Education, Ramsar, Iran.

10.22080/iselt.2025.29711.1113

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of information-gap tasks in enhancing the phrasal verb knowledge of high school students (aged 18). Two hundred students participated in the initial sample selection stage. An OPT was administered, and 60 students at the intermediate level (based on the OPT table, 120-139) were selected to participate in the study. This level was chosen because in most lower levels, one cannot find a wide range of these multi-word verbs, and they are not taught as a separate class of verbs. In higher levels, there is a greater focus on them, and their teaching procedure may vary considerably. They were then randomly assigned to two groups: experimental and control. Over two weeks (ten sessions) of treatment, the experimental group engaged in information-gap activities focused on phrasal verbs, while the control group received traditional methods of instruction for these verbs. A pretest-posttest design, using paper-and-pencil tasks, assessed and compared the phrasal verb knowledge of both groups. Pretest results indicated that participants had limited initial familiarity with the targeted phrasal verbs; many recognized the words but struggled with recall and contextual application. Post-test data analysis revealed that both instructional approaches improved accuracy with phrasal verbs. However, the experimental group, exposed to information-gap activities, demonstrated significantly greater gains than the control group. These findings suggest that information-gap activities can lead to substantial improvements in learners' semantic knowledge and practical application of phrasal verbs, supporting their use in task-based language instruction.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by the Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of Mazandaran. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

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