EnglishClub

Matt Errey is the author of “1000 Phrasal Verbs in Context”

Phrasal verbs, or multi-word verbs, consist of a verb and one or more particles, as in “Our science teacher comes from India” and “I’m looking forward to the party”. There are hundreds of phrasal verbs that your students will have to learn on the road to fluency, and in this article Matt Errey, author of 1000 Phrasal Verbs in Context, gives you some useful tips on teaching them.

1. Find books, e-books and online resources on phrasal verbs. Look for a dictionary of phrasal verbs or a similar reference with lots of contextual sentences, like 1000 Phrasal Verbs in Context. Also look for resources with phrasal verb exercises, including gap-fill exercises and matching exercises, as well as phrasal verb quizzes and games. Spend a little time browsing them to get an idea of how you can use them.

2. Learning the grammar of phrasal verbs can help some students, and you can teach the basics in a brief introductory lesson. Cover topics like transitive and intransitive, separable and inseparable, and the use of pronouns. For students who find this difficult, tell them that native speakers use phrasal verbs perfectly well without studying the grammar, and they will too if they keep on reading and speaking English.

3. Don’t waste time teaching the parts of speech in phrasal verbs. If you need to refer to a phrasal verb’s preposition or adverb, use the word particle instead. Knowing whether the word “up” in break up is a preposition or an adverb won’t help your students, and teaching them this could confuse or bore them. Native speakers can’t name these parts of speech, and your students don’t need to either.

4. To teach individual phrasal verbs, use clear contextual sentences to elicit the meaning rather than simply providing a definition. For example, give your students a sentence like “If it starts to rain, put on your coat” and ask if anyone can guess the meaning of put on. When someone says they can, ask them to act it out, or use it in another contextual sentence, or explain the meaning if they can. After teaching a group of phrasal verbs, use quizzes, gap-fill exercises, matching exercises, etc to test your students’ understanding.

5. Have your students create a phrasal verbs notebook. Teach them shorthand like (sb) and (sth) that will help them remember how to use the phrasal verbs correctly. Give examples like find (sth) out, help (sb) out and look after (sb/sth). Explain that (sb/sth) means the object can be somebody (human) or something (non-human). If (sb), (sth) or (sb/sth) is placed between the verb and the particle(s), it means the phrasal verb is separable, but if it’s placed after the verb and particle(s), it’s inseparable. Check a phrasal verbs dictionary for other forms of shorthand you can teach your students.

6. Tell your students to use whatever works best for them when adding definitions or memory prompts in their notebooks. For some students a contextual sentence or two will be enough to prompt their memory, while for others adding a definition in their native language will help. For more advanced learners, writing a dictionary-style definition in English might work best, as in “make (sth) up = to invent something such as a story or an explanation”. Definitions like this aren’t very useful for less advanced learners however as they usually contain Latinate verbs (like invent) and other words they may not know, so tell them not to just copy definitions like this from a dictionary. Teach them how to make up their own prompts and definitions like the ones described above instead.

7. Try to avoid using synonymous Latinate verbs to define phrasal verbs when you’re teaching. Even though Latinate verbs are often found in dictionary definitions, they aren’t very useful in most classes. If you say “to speed up means to accelerate”, most of your students won’t know the word accelerate. Instead of learning what “to speed up” means, all they’ll have is two roughly synonymous vocabulary items, neither of which they understand. Elicit the meaning instead, as described in Tip 4. Also, exercises in which learners match phrasal verbs with Latinate verbs are very common, but they should only be used in advanced classes.

8. Try to be methodical in the way you teach. Many teachers find it useful to create small groups of related phrasal verbs they can teach together in a class. They can be phrasal verbs that begin with the same verb, like get up, get out, get in, etc, or end the same way, like get out of, run out of, talk out of, etc. They can also be grouped by topic, as in wake up, get up, sleep in, etc. Group them in a variety ways when teaching if you like.

9. One final tip you can pass on to your students. If they want to use a phrasal verb but can’t remember if it’s separable or inseparable, tell them to use the unseparated form (“Look up the word”) instead of the separated form (“Look the word up”). If they do this, they’ll always be correct.

Suggested Texts

1000 Phrasal Verbs in Context
by Matt Errey
TEFL Games Co.

English Phrasal Verbs in Use
by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell
Cambridge University Press

Suggested Online Resources

• Phrasal Verbs Reference
• Phrasal Verbs List
• Phrasal Verb Quizzes
• The Grammar of Phrasal Verbs

1. Find books and e-books of ESL games and become familiar with the type of games in each. This will make it easier to find the right game for a particular lesson.

2. When choosing games for a class, check that they’re for the right age group, the right level of proficiency, the right number of students and they’ll take up a suitable length of time. Books and e-books of ESL games should provide all these details for each game.

3. Occasionally games can be used to fill in time or provide a break from the usual class routines. But most of the time games should have a function within a lesson plan. For example, they can be used at the start of a lesson to introduce material or they can be used towards the end of a lesson to test, reinforce or practise the language elements or skills presented.

4. Choose games with simple rules and clear instructions. You shouldn’t have to waste valuable classroom time explaining complicated rules or giving complex instructions. After explaining how a game works, ask if anyone has any questions.

5. In classes for adults and young adults, you might need to briefly explain the purpose of the game in terms of the material covered in the lesson. Some older learners will think games are only for children, and explaining their function can help these learners see games as a valid and useful activity.

6. For younger learners up to the ages of 10 or 11, games that involve some physical movement often work best. When children are enjoying themselves and having fun, they often feel excited and full of energy. If they’re forced to stay still, they can become restless and even disruptive.

7. Don’t put too much emphasis on winning a game by awarding prizes or titles like “class champion”. The emphasis should be on having fun and learning. If the emphasis is on winning, negative feelings like disappointment, shame, envy or blame can spoil the atmosphere.

8. If a game involves quiz questions or information exchanges, try to use topics that interest your students. These can be topics like music, movies, sports, local news, etc. This will help to make the game more interesting and help your students to stay focused.

9. If you have many students and you’d like them to play a game that works best with just a few players, have them form small groups. Then explain the game while modelling it with one group while the others look on. When everyone understands how it works, the other groups can begin playing. This is better than having one group play while all the other students watch and wait for their turn to play.

10. Start a “Games Diary” in which you keep notes on each game you use in your classes. You can note how difficult or easy it was to explain, whether your students enjoyed it or not, and how well it performed its function. After using a game, you can even ask your students questions like “Was it fun?”, “Did it help you to learn?”, “Could it be improved?” and record their answers in your diary as well.

Competitive and Co-operative Games

When reading about or discussing the use of games in the classroom, you’ve probably heard particular games referred to as being either “competitive games” or “co-operative games”. The tendency to label games with one or other of these terms seems to have first become widespread in the 1960s and 1970s during debates among Western academics on teaching methods and classroom practices. These debates occurred within a broader debate on how Western social institutions such as the family, religious organizations, mass media, schools and universities, etc., were contributing to the socialization of the young. Social critics of the day, most notably Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (first published in 1964), suggested that these institutions conditioned the young so as to produce a population of docile citizens willing and able to accept their role as diligent producers on the one hand, and enthusiastic consumers on the other, in a modern capitalist society. Other critics, such as Ivan Illich in his 1971 book Deschooling Society, began to examine the role of the classroom, and particular classroom practices, in this process of socialization. Critics argued that in the traditional classroom the teacher was regarded as the sole possessor of knowledge and authority, while students were regarded as passive receptacles for the teacher’s knowledge and approval. This classroom structure was widely criticized at this time, as were many other aspects of the traditional educational system, such as rote learning, exam-based assessment, and the rigid division of knowledge into distinct and separate subjects.

Another aspect of traditional education that was widely criticized was the use of competition in the classroom, either as a means of grading students, or as a means of motivating them. It was seen as a reflection of the overly competitive nature of life in modern capitalist societies, and also as a means of preparing the young for life out there in the “dog eat dog world” that awaited them. One often-cited example of the use of competition in the classroom was the practice of having students compete against one another for awards, scholarships, and access to further education. This practice of pitting students against one another was widely criticized as it was seen as encouraging students to regard a classmate’s failure to perform well as boosting their own chances of success in the struggle for the rewards on offer. These radical critiques of the role of competition within the education system led to a tendency among certain academics and writers to regard anything that could be labelled “competitive” as problematic, including games or classroom activities that involved any form of competition. An example of this tendency can be found in a book published in 1986 entitled No Contest: The Case Against Competition by U.S. “independent scholar” Alfie Kohn in which he argued that all competitive games are bad for children, and that a teacher should never inflict the evils of competition upon his or her students. This book was quite influential at the time of its publication, especially in the U.S., and for several years thereafter the view it had put forward was widely-held among progressive teachers, although the fact that children continued to insist on playing competitive games in the playground, and on the sports field, suggests that students themselves weren’t entirely convinced of the merits of its “anti-competitive” stance.

In the succeeding decades, this view has gradually come to be seen by more and more educators as being somewhat extreme, and many have shifted to a more balanced viewpoint. One of the reasons for this shift is the fact that the practice of labelling games as either “competitive” or “co-operative” has itself been challenged. Classifying games in this way is seen by many as being overly simplistic in that it obscures the fact that all games are, by nature, highly co-operative activities, not only the so-called “co-operative games”. For any so-called “competitive game” to work, players must co-operate in a number of ways. They must all behave in ways that accord to the basic premise of the game, they must all agree to obey the rules of the game, and they must all accept the authority of an adjudicator, if there is one, even when they are convinced that he or she has made a mistake. In addition, the fact that many so-called “competitive games”, including many of those described in this book, are team games means that players must closely co-operate with their teammates while playing. As such, playing a competitive game requires a great deal of co-operation, and this fact is only obscured by the use of words like “competitive” and “co-operative” to distinguish different types of games.

The development of a more balanced view in relation to the use of competitive games in the classroom meant that both the benefits, on the one hand, and the pitfalls, on the other hand, were acknowledged. The challenge for educators then became one of determining how to enjoy the benefits of competition while at the same time minimizing any potential pitfalls. What educators were looking for has often been characterized as “healthy competition”, as opposed to “unhealthy competition”.

Healthy and Unhealthy Competition

While most educators now agree that using competition in the classroom is not necessarily problematic, most would agree that it’s important to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy competition. For most, healthy competition means placing the emphasis on having fun while learning with one’s classmates, rather than on winning at all costs. In order to ensure the emphasis is on fun and learning, teachers shouldn’t offer any special reward to the winner of a game. It doesn’t matter whether the reward is something material like a prize or a medal, something symbolic like the title of “class champion”, or even something more subtle like special affection or approval. Offering any such reward is unhealthy as it can lead to an overemphasis on winning, which in turn can lead to undesirable consequences such as arguments about the rules, accusations of cheating, feelings of shame or failure when losing, feelings of anger and frustration with teammates who make mistakes, and so on. As long as teachers don’t make winning the focus, students can enjoy the fun, excitement and learning opportunities that playing a competitive game can bring.

Another problem that is sometimes cited is the possibility that students might feel that losing a game means they’ve “lost face”, or that losing a game could damage a student’s self-esteem, even when winning has not been emphasized by the teacher. While there’s little evidence to support such a concern, if you feel that it’s a valid consideration in the culture in which you’re teaching, you could consider only using team games rather than games in which students compete as individuals. Doing so should mean that responsibility for losing a game is shared among team members, and individual players might be less likely to feel as if they’ve “lost face”. Some games, such as the ESL board game Word Up, can be played by individual players or by teams, allowing them to be used in whichever way best suits the cultural or social setting in which they’re being played.

While some of the games and activities in Matt’s ESL Games and Quizzes could be labelled “co-operative” or “non-competitive”, the majority involve some degree of competition. This is because the book is, in part, a collection of some of most popular and widely-used ESL games, and most of these are, to some degree, competitive. It is also because many teachers nowadays believe that the benefits of using competitive games outweigh any possible drawbacks, especially when they are used in the spirit of healthy competition outlined above.

References:

• Kohn, A. No Contest: The Case Against Competition Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Revised 1992.
• Shindler, J. (2009). Examining the Use of Competition in the Classroom. In Transformative Classroom Management. Pub. by Jossey Bass Wiley 2009
• Zan, B  and Hildebrandt, C (2005). Cooperative and Competitive Games in Constructivist Classrooms. In The Constructivist Fall 2005 Vol. 16, No. 1