TEACHING ELEMENTARY LEVEL HiGH FREQUENCY PHRASAL VERBS - ESSAY.doc

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 – 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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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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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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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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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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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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- 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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TEACHING ELEMENTARY LEVEL HiGH FREQUENCY PHRASAL VERBS - ESSAY.doc