Abstract:

The aims of the present study are: a) to examine the methodological issues on the development of context-dependent and context-independent task development process in investigating the cognitive verb complementation patterns in English; b) to design and administer task items to analyze the learners’ recognition and production levels in the use of verb complementation patterns and their related verb senses. The paper adopted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design and followed a three-phase procedure covering the creation of task items and the development of instruments, administration of context-dependent and context-independent tasks to 200 Turkish EFL learners and conducting the reliability and validity measurements based on the interpretation of the results. Based on the validity and reliability analyses results, the tasks designed for factive and nonfactive cognitive verb complementation analysis were found to be acceptable. Thus, this study offers valid and reliable context-dependent and context-independent tasks to examine the learners’ competence at the recognition level and their performance at the production level in the use of cognitive verb complementation patterns and their related verb senses in the English language. These tasks provide a novel application by shedding light on the developmental relationship between the learners’ state of knowledge regarding verb complementation and their vocabulary knowledge and address both the learners’ comprehension and production of cognitive verbs. In this sense, a number of implications are suggested for pedagogical purposes and further inquiries.

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