Students will greatly improve their English language ability, if they can utilize phrasal verbs. Can they supply other examples of companies that were taken over recently? Supply an example of a company that has filed for bankruptcy. Have any of your students heard about another company that has gone under recently?
From such examples the students may figure out the definition for themselves, or if they are having a bit of trouble with it, help them guess. Give them lots of examples. Use the names of real companies, people and places. Above all, help them understand the phrasal verb, beyond the mere memorization of a definition. There are a number of ways in which students can practice their new phrasal verbs. Worksheets are a standard, traditional option.
These may be downloaded from the internet, or the teacher could write his or her own worksheet. Short videos, such as are found on Youtube and easily downloaded to a hard drive of a computer, may also be used to teach students to recognized phrasal verbs, as they are being used in ordinary conversations. A worksheet may be written to go along with the video, or students may list the phrasal verbs that they were able to catch, and discussion may follow.
The goal for the teacher is to help students go from very controlled activities or exercises to using the new phrasal verbs on their own. Here are a couple of activities that may help. Give every pair of students phrasal verbs that they must use in a conversation.
The students must come up with a dialogue, put it down on paper, and then act it out in front of the class. Another exercise that encourages the use of phrasal verbs in ordinary speech is to give each student a set of phrasal verbs that they must use in an e-mail to a friend or family member. For example, they may use phrasal verbs connected with food to write about their holiday meal.
For more advanced students, such as those who study English for business, ask them to prepare a PowerPoint presentation that shows examples of what was discussed in class. They will need to research takeovers or bankruptcies and put the information on their slides. To summarize, phrasal verbs are essentially idioms, and they need to be learned as idioms, a few at a time. They need to be presented and practiced in real or simulated circumstances.
The most important task for the teacher is to group the phrasal verbs systematically, so that by means of association they can be more easily remembered. Above all, have a good time with your students and enjoy some laughs. These phrases are often quite colorful and interesting, especially to those who speak a native language other than English. Important information about phrasal verbs Introduction A phrasal verb is the combination of a standard verb such as make or put with one or two particles.
There are three main reasons for this: In many cases the meaning of the phrasal verb cannot be deduced from its elements, i. For example: a learner who knows that to tick is to make a checkmark may have difficulty in understanding the sentence The teacher ticked off the student for being late , in which the phrasal verb to tick off means to reprimand or to express disapproval.
Many phrasal verbs are polysemous; i. The phrasal verb to put down has the literal meaning of putting something down on the table or floor. But it also has the idiomatic meanings: to make someone feel small, to criticize and humiliate them to kill as in the sentence I had to have my cat put down.
There are difficulties with the grammar of phrasal verbs, particularly with the position of the particles. Look at the following examples: She put down the baby. Because of this, they find it difficult to understand sentences such as, Can we put this off until tomorrow?
The fact that many phrasal verbs have non-literal idiomatic meanings is at the heart of the problem for many learners. Multiple meanings. For example, the phrasal verb put off has six different meanings, some of which are quite different: e. The fact that phrasal verbs often have more than one meaning seems to worry students a lot.
D uplication of components. The vast number of phrasal verbs are made from just a limited number of words, meaning that students can easily get confused. For example, phrasal verbs with put include: put about, put above, put across, put around, put aside, put away, put back, put before, put behind, put down, put down as, put down for, put down to, put forward, put in, put in for, put into, put off , etc.
In dealing with phrasal verbs it is important to address these issues and make students aware that they need not be too problematic and that, like other vocabulary items, there are ways in which they can be learnt.
Knowing any word is a complex thing as is discussed in the article What do words mean? Understanding phrasal verbs is no more or less complicated, but can be made more so by thinking the words combine the meaning of the two component parts.
Dealing with the issue of mistaken familiarity is reasonably easy, as the solution lies in making our students aware that phrasal verbs need to be treated as items of vocabulary in their own right and not as a combination in meaning of two separate words. Dealing with the issue of multiple meanings is also not overly difficult. Multiple meanings actually occur with many items of vocabulary and not just phrasal verbs.
Making students aware that words often have more than one meaning is part and parcel of teaching vocabulary. The issue of duplication of components needs to be dealt with in two ways. The first is to treat phrasal verbs in a systematic way, which will be looked at in the next few sections of this article.
The second is to help students find ways of recording the vocabulary they learn so that they can access it easily, a few ideas of which are suggested in another article in this series, Techniques for teaching and learning.
We teach phrasal verbs to our students from when they are beginners onwards. For example, the present simple and the topic of daily routines is packed with phrasal verbs, i. Having a specific lesson, unless it is to help students overcome their fear of phrasal verbs, seems to me to be counterproductive.
When a coursebook has a page which focuses just on phrasal verbs, it is implying that they are especially different and difficult and consequently make the situation worse for students rather than helping them. Including phrasal verbs naturally in the context of a lesson seems a much better way of dealing with them. Help students understand that phrasal verbs are items of vocabulary that need to be treated in the same way as other vocabulary, i.
See the article on What do words mean? When phrasal verbs come up as part of a lesson they should certainly be dealt with, but not by having a lesson dedicated solely to them. Some people believe that phrasal verbs can't be treated in the same way as other items of vocabulary. It is all well and good teaching phrasal verbs in context and including them as part of the vocabulary of any lesson they appear in, but we must not ignore the problems or perceived problems that students have with them.
Raising awareness is important, but it is not the only thing we can do in order to help students understand the meaning of phrasal verbs. We can also help students by looking at phrasal verbs as metaphors. For speakers of Romance languages, the Graeco-Latin vocabulary of English is transparent, by and large, though of course the English meanings are not always exactly what learners would expect. Teach plenty of phrasal verbs at elementary level, in the context of general vocabulary teaching.
Encourage learners to look for similarities of meaning in sets of vocabulary items like these:. I scraped my elbow when I fell over. She just manages to scrape by on her wage. The new candidate scraped in by a tiny one-vote margin. He just managed to scrape through the entrance exam. Their candidate scraped home by just fifteen votes. Is he the best speaker they could get? Similarly, in working on phrasal verbs associated with a theme or topic or situation, mix them in with other useful relevant vocabulary:.
For instance, come up with a good idea could be illustrated by a cartoon of a diver coming up to the surface with a shining lightbulb representing the good idea. Assisting the students of our language.
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