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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
DELTA MODULE TWO
LSA 3 – PART ONE
SYSTEMS: Helping lower levels to understand and use
high frequency phrasal verbs
KHARA BURGESS
LORD BYRON COLLEGE
CENTRE NO: IT295
DATE OF SUBMISSION:
31 October 2013
WORD COUNT: 2421
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
LSA 3 – PART ONE
SYSTEMS: PHRASAL VERBS
Introduction page 3
Analysis and issues page 4
The Grammatical Form
a) Memorising the form
b) Transitivity and Separability
Meaning and Use page 6
a) Polysemy and Idiomatic Meaning
b) Synonymy and Formality
Phonological Form page 7
Suggestions for Teaching page 8
a) Form
b) Meaning and Use
Conclusion page 11
Bibliography page 13
Appendix page 14
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
Introduction
There are a large number of ‘multi-word units’ in English, which are fixed and
function as if they were one word, some of which include idioms, proverbs, binomials
and phrasal verbs. My teaching experience has shown that ESL students at all levels
consider the latter type to be the most daunting of all these, which comes as no
surprise if we consider their particular ‘grammar’, multiple meanings and profusion in
all registers. Their reputation of being difficult is not aided by the way they are
traditionally taught, through long isolated lists, which not only confuse students but
also makes them averse to learning phrasal verbs. An alternative method would be to
place them into an everyday context, such as ‘daily routines’, a theme commonly
taught at elementary level. But even if we consider the common phrasal verbs
connected to this, such as get up, put on, take off and tidy up, they all still have the
inherent complexities only tackled at intermediate level, such as whether they can be
separated, followed by an object, or have multiple meanings. Currently teaching
elementary levels and noticing how few phrasal verbs are included in the syllabus,
this essay stems from the motivation to explore ways in which we can raise learner
awareness of these complex issues from day one. I will look at ways in which some
kind of a context and a focus on the particle can be a solution and a means to teach
more phrasal verbs earlier on.
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
Analysis and Issues
Grammatical Form
A Phrasal Verb is either two or three part and consists of a verb followed an adverb, a
preposition or both. They are categorised by their transitivity and separability. They
include:
Phrasal Verb Type Example Explanation
1) Transitive, separable 1) He took the jacket off
2) He took off the jacket
3) He took it off
These need a direct object,
which can be placed before or
after the particle, or a
pronoun, which must come
between the verb and particle.
2) Transitive, inseparable 1) I go into school
2) I go into it at 8am.
These also need a direct object
or pronoun, but these have a
fixed position after the
particle.
3) Intransitive, inseparable 1) I get up at 7am No object is taken with this
type of phrasal verb.
4) Three-part (transitive,
inseparable)
1) I get on with my boss. As with 2.
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
a) Memorising the form
There are only a handful of languages in which phrasal verbs exist, so many students
struggle with the idea that its different parts are grammatically and semantically
linked. This makes memorization difficult, with the majority of students failing to
remember the correct particle, using expressions such as ‘get in/up’ when they
actually mean ‘get on with’.
b) Transitivity and Separability
The concept of transitivity can cause confusion, with students making mistakes either
inserting objects where they are not permitted or omitting them altogether, for
instance, a student recently said “I wake up and I put on then eat breakfast”, to which
further clarification was needed. Adding to this difficulty, some phrasal verbs are both
transitive and intransitive, depending on their context and intended meaning, e.g. ‘He
gets up at 7am’ shows an intransitive form, but if it used with a different meaning, as
in ‘He helped her get up the mountain’, it becomes transitive.
Failure to remember the separability can result in clumsy sentences, such as ‘I don’t
get with him on’ and potentially result in a breakdown in communication. Even when
phrasal verbs are separable, they are generally kept close to the verb, which can be
problematic with speakers of some languages, such as German, in which a particle
goes at the end of a long clause. This L1 transfer can give rise to sentences like “I
drop the children at their school off,” which is grammatically correct but seemingly
inappropriate to a native speaker (Cowan 2008).
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
Meaning and Use
a) Polysemy and Idiomatic meaning
The majority of phrasal verbs are polysemous, and while some meanings can be
deduced from context, others cannot, even when their individual components are
understood. This will be looked at in terms of the meanings of ‘take off’ which lower
levels often encounter:
Literal meaning: ‘She took off her jacket’
Here the meaning of ‘remove’ can easily be guessed from the context, and this type of
phrasal verb presents fewer problems for the elementary learner.
Semi-idiomatic: ‘The plane took off from the airport’
Here the significance is figurative because the particle adds to the verb “consistent
aspectual meaning,” with ‘off’ denoting the idea of ‘to move away from a place or
position’ (Celce-Mercia & Larsen-Freeman 1996:432). While this is a common
expression with no real substitute in everyday English, lower level students may
initially struggle to comprehend the idea of there being an alternative meaning to the
former.
b) Synonymy and Formality
It is a misconception that phrasal verbs should be avoided in formal registers because
they usually express a semantic meaning for which there is no obvious single-word
equivalent. While many do have a single-word synonym of Latinate origin, such as
‘return’ for ‘get back’, if these are taught in conjunction with the phrasal verb they
tend to be overused and often become a replacement, especially by speakers of
romance languages who have cognate words in their first language. A form of error
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
avoidance, the complete replacement of the phrasal verb can make a speaker sound
unnatural and deny them full idiomaticity, which can lead to complete
misunderstanding at times, with utterances like ‘I maintain my mother’ to mean ‘I
look after my mother’. The common phrasal verb ‘slow down’, usually encountered at
elementary level has been shown in a corpus study to be far more frequently than its
equivalent ‘decelerate’, even in very formal texts, as we can note from an extract in a
zoology textbook: ‘…their metabolism slows down so much that the pineal is virtually
switched off’ (Fletcher 2006: para 7). Similarly, the phrasal verb ‘put on’ is more
often used than ‘don’, e.g. ‘She put on her shoes’, which shows that many high
frequency phrasal verbs encountered at lower level is the most natural way of saying
something, without running the risk of sounding pretentious.
Phonological Form
In natural English conversation, speech tends to become connected and within this a
number of features arise. Firstly, word boundaries with a consonant and a vowel
become linked and since phrasal verbs end in a particle, this is often the case, e.g. ‘get
on’ sounds like ‘geton’ or ‘put on’ as ‘puton’, which could be interpreted by students
as ‘button’. Secondly, if the word boundary involves two vowel sounds then native
speakers tend to insert an extra, intruding sound, either /r/, /w/ or /j/ as in ‘go/w/away’
and ’go/w/out’. These features can make phrasal verb recognition a challenge for
students, particularly those at lower levels who have had less exposure to them.
Furthermore, the aspects of stress patterns apply to phrasal verbs at word and sentence
level and depend on which type they are, as can be seen in the following:
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
- Transitive and separable: The verb and particle are stressed when unseparated
or when separated by a pronoun e.g. ‘take off your jacket/ take it off ‘. If an
object is between the two, the particle is unstressed, e.g. ‘He took the jacket
off’
- Transitive and inseparable: The particle is unstressed and the verb carries the
stress, e.g .’We went into the school at 8am’
- Intransitive: The particle carries the stress, e.g. ‘It is time to get up’
- Three-part (transitive, inseparable): The first particle is stressed, e.g. ‘I get on
with my boss’.
Learning the correct stress pattern at sentence level is useful as changing it affects
the overall meaning. The utterance, ‘I ran into the store’ is different to ‘I ran into
the store’, with the former meaning to involuntarily crash into the store and the
latter to enter voluntarily.
Suggestions for teaching
Form
As separability involves the moving of parts of a phrasal verb, the physicality of this
could be exploited with a sentence jumble activity using cut-up sentences that have
been learnt in the lesson, which are then reordered. An alternative, which would
appeal to bodily-kinaesthetic learners, could be to give each student a word of a
sentence and they reorder themselves to make a grammatically correct sentence. At
lower levels, a means of raising awareness of the idea of separable and inseparable
phrasal verbs without explicit instruction could involve boarding sentences in which
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
the phrasal verbs have not been separated, and learners then remodel them with the
aim of getting them to separate the phrasal verb. This method can be used with the
same phrasal verb in several sentences but students need to decide which are correct,
with the teacher asking in each case if they can be split or not. The correct sentences
should then be recorded in a lexical notebook.
Meaning and use
Given the fact that students tend to overuse or opt for the one-word Latinate
equivalents over their multi-word unit, I believe these should be avoided in teaching
at elementary levels if possible, as these could become fossilized into the student’s
interlanguage. Another means to introduce them is advocated by Michael Lewis, who
suggests that lexical chunks ‘need to be organised in some way’ into a ‘context,
situation or theme’ (Lewis 2000:43), such as ‘daily routines’ for elementary levels. By
introducing the new lexical items within a text and highlighting them, the student can
view them as part of larger lexical chunks, which inductively yields vital information
about their meaning and use. The meaning can be explored with a definition-match
exercise (sentential, rather than focused solely on the phrasal verb), followed by gap
fills using sentences from the original text. Any focus on a phrasal verb should be
used as a means to develop more collocations or phrasal verbs, e.g. with ‘turn on’: the
teacher says ‘Shall I turn on / off the radio? Mario, can you turn the light off please?’
This can be followed by freer practice, where learners are encouraged to respond to
questions containing the phrasal verbs. In this way repetition aids memorisation and
lexical context gives meaning, as the parts are not viewed as isolated units.
Using a similar approach, lower levels should be made aware of the fact that all
phrasal verbs have a literal and figurative multiple meaning. A short text in which the
same phrasal verb is repeated with its various meanings, e.g. using ‘take off’ in
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
various ways to describe ‘a holiday’ and the students then match these with their
definitions. Those who are visual learners can benefit from cartoons, which can be
supplied or created so as to illustrate the more idiomatic meanings e.g. ‘take off time
from work’ can be represented by someone cutting a clock in half, one half labeled
‘work’ and the other ‘holiday’.
Some coursebooks, such as the Pre-Intermediate New English File (Oxenden &
Latham-Koenig 2006:159), use a picture to text match to focus on the delexicalised
verb, for example ‘get’ with its various collocations and phrasal verbs. I have found
these types of tasks to be confusing and less memorable for the learner, since the
chunks have no clear relation to each other. Since it is more often the particle and not
the verb that students have problems memorizing, I believe a focus on the former
would be a more practical solution. Gairns and Redman (1986) suggest that focusing
on the particle can be done effectively if in a group of phrasal verbs they represent
one meaning, such as ‘get up’, or ‘go up’ where its use as a directional preposition
comes to the forefront. At a later stage other meanings can be highlighted, as in ‘drink
up’ or ‘use up’, where ‘up’ refers to completion. Most of the common phrasal verb
particles, such as ‘up, down, in, out, on’ and ‘off’ have literal meanings that relate to
'spatial orientation', and this concept also has a figurative aspect found in many
languages, such as ‘to be down’. Focusing on the way the particle pertains to a
position in space can be enhanced through TPR, which can visually and physically
show its usage, for example, students can physically respond to topic-related
commands which lend itself to this idea such as ‘classroom instructions’, with phrasal
verbs like ‘stand up/ sit down/ put up your hand ’. Drawing student awareness to the
particle in different ways can encourage them to look for and identify systematic
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
features of meaning in the way they are used in both a literal and more abstract sense,
which will consequently increase their ability to deal with unfamiliar phrasal verbs
they may encounter in the future.
Phonological Form
The phonological focus should be on the phrasal verb at sentence level, which will
raise student awareness of how it is said in connected speech and that it always carries
stress. Firstly the pronunciation can be drilled through choral repetition and a
substitution drill to include various collocations. Then word stress can be concentrated
on by doing a rhythmic drilling accompanied by clapping to the specific stress
patterns. This is especially useful for students whose L1 is syllable timed, such as
Italian and Spanish, so they can witness the stress-timed nature of English. An
extension activity could involve a freer practice activity where students work in pairs
to ask and answer questions containing the relevant phrasal verbs.
Conclusion
The activities that have been discussed should be enhanced by encouraging students
to record the phrasal verb collocations, the translation, example sentences that show
their separability, the pronunciation and stress pattern and preferably within a
particular theme (see appendix). To sum up, it would seem viable that to more
efficiently prepare lower level students to become more confident and successful in
using phrasal verbs, these various methods have merit if used judiciously. Placing
phrasal verbs into a level-appropriate context can help students understand their form
and (multiple) meaning, without needing an explicit explanation. It also aids memory
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
and fluency as it implies the acquisition of lexical sets as opposed to isolated lexical
items and focus on the particle can enable students to see any semantic connections as
opposed to confusion. The fact that students have limited knowledge of phrasal verbs
by the time they reach intermediate level shows that they need to be taught more and
earlier on, not as a marginalized area of the syllabus but as fully integrated into lexis
teaching.
Bibliography
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
Celce-Murcia, M., Larsen-Freeman, D. (1996). The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL
Teacherʼs Course, Second Edition. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.
Cowan, R. (2008). The Teacherʼs Grammar of English: A Course Book and Reference
Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fletcher, B (2006). ‘Register and Phrasal verbs’, internet www page at URL:
http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/MED-Magazine/September2005/33-Phrasal-
Verbs-Register.htm (accessed 29/09/2013)
Gairns, R. & Redman, S. (1986) Working with Words: a Guide to Teaching and
Learning Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oxenden, C. & Latham-Koenig, C. (2006) New English File: Pre-Intermediate. Oxfor
University Press.
Appendix
Format for a lexical notebook entry
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Khara Burgess
LSA 3 Systems: Helping lower levels to understand and use high frequency phrasal verbs
PHRASAL VERB
(pronunciation)
1. Translation and (any) collocations
2. Example sentence/s with stress pattern and any synonym in English.
Working Example (Italian learner) under the category of ‘going on holiday’
TAKE OFF ( )
1. togliersi di dosso e.g. take off shoes/ socks/ coat
‘Take off your jacket/ take it off/ take your hat off’ (remove)
2. Prendersi una vacanza e.g. take off time
‘Why don’t you take some days off?’ (a holiday from work)
3. decollare (no object)
‘His airplane took off at 8am the next day’ (depart)
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