How to teach phrasal verbs

It’s hard to find a less hated topic than phrasal verbs. Students often say that they look the same, are hard to understand, and easy to confuse with the phrasal verbs that have completely different meanings! Plus, they can’t be translated literally. 

How should we, as professionals, deal with such a difficult topic, though? Are there any ways to make studying phrasal verbs less challenging? 

Let’s see. 

The main reason why teaching phrasal verbs may seem so complicated is the usage of the wrong approaches. 

There are some common mistakes that a lot of educators tend to make while working with phrasal verbs: 

All of these problems may have a great impact on your students’ progress in studying and using phrasal verbs. 

Let’s look at what we can do to avoid these teaching mistakes.

First of all, group your phrasal verbs correctly.

Such lists only overwhelm your students.

It’s not productive because the only thing that all these phrases have in common is the first word, not the meaning, which makes the process of remembering even more confusing.

It’s true that this approach seems much more reasonable and may even turn out to be effective. However, it’s still not the best way to learn phrasal verbs.

Here, all the most common phrasal verbs are grouped according to their meaning and the topic they belong to. 

By grouping phrasal verbs in this way you make your students associate such lexical chunks with their meaning first and foremost. 

A lot of professionals treat phrasal verbs as something extraordinary and separate phrasal verbs from the rest of the vocabulary and functional language. It is understandable from a formal point of view. However, is that really the right way to teach phrasal verbs?

That is true, that phrasal verbs might be complicated to handle, and it is important to pay extra attention to the form.

Including phrasal verbs into appropriate context, adding them to  the target language on the topic and treating them as any other piece of vocabulary really makes the task of dealing with phrasal verbs much easier both for students and for teachers.

Flashcards, presentations, quizzes, and matching games are all beyond being beneficial to remember phrasal verbs.

Firstly, it is fun because you can  choose the most beloved or trendy series.

Secondly, it is effective as it provides the students with a comprehensive example of how and in what context the phrasal verb is used.

Also, it is memorable because real stories and characters help us to really remember the phrase in context, and this is something that simple textbook examples may fail to do. 

You can use authentic materials to illustrate the meaning of the phrasal verb, like it is done here: 

Here are some ideas:

Assign your students to watch the episode/ extract and write down as many phrasal verbs as they can. Ask to discuss their meanings after. It usually turns out to be fun and competitive.

Last but not least, give your students a chance to practice as much as possible, come back to the same phrases over and over again from time to time and revise them. 

To sum up, as you can see, teaching phrasal verbs may be fun and engaging rather than unbearably challenging. It only takes the right approach and a bit of creativity.  What about you? Do you have any tips on how to teach phrasal verbs effectively? Let us know in the comments!