TeachingEnglish
Phrasal verbs
Submitted by lars on 10 July, 2009 - 16:52
Hello to everybody!
I am Lari, an English teacher from Romania and I am very intrested in finding more about the most useful teaching techniques of the so called phrasal verbs or muti word verbs. Many teachers have a negative attitude when they have to teach them, especially at lower levels.
I would like to ask all the people reading the articles on this site to help me by letting me know about websites where I could find the data I need. Thank you all for the time you spent reading my entry!
Have all the best in your personal and working life!
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I use synonyms mostly but to teach that part as a special chapter your students must be at least at medium level.
Many languages have their own phrases and group of verbs to be named as phareses. so, each language has its own ways to be taken for the penetration of those phrases to the Ss' minds. in my opinion; English provides some ways to us as; using the synonyms, grouping them with the initial word of the phrase,taking advantage of onomotopedias, illustral clues.
Idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs are critical aspects for honing your language skills. Once an individual starts his career, lot of oral and written communication will be through idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs. I personally feel using synonyms is totally different from phrasal verbs. Synonyms can be highly verbose and the students will find it very difficult to understand its application because the use of a synonym would depend on the situation.
On the other hand phrasal verbs are very simple and can take the place of a high falutin vocabulary or an idiomatic phrase. You need to tell your students that phrasal verbs are very simple to comprehend. It is just a combination of a verb with different prepositions wherein the verb remains the same but the preposition changes to communicate a variety of messages. In the case of idiomatic phrases, you need to understand the sentence as a whole without breaking it into various units. You could probably tell them that on cloud nine does not mean someone is sitting on cloud nine. It means someone is very happy.
You can take any verb like get and share with them various combinations of phrasal verbs which can be formed like get on, get over, get in, and use these phrasal verbs to form a sentence. You can then ask the students to guess the meaning of the phrasal verb with respect to the whole sentnece. Make it a very interactive session and make your students think. Once their mind starts working, they will come up with lot of meanings. Encourage them to make mistakes and then guide them through the meaning and application of the phrasal verb.
You could start as per the alphabetical order and slowly cover the commonly used phrasal verbs. You need not visit any website for this. You are the best judge to decide the level of your students and the methodology to be used to get the message across to your students.
All the best
Hi
High falutin vocabulary is new to me and I wonder how could one overcome the challenge of learning not all but enough to be utilised knowledge of idioms, phrasal verbs, synomyms, idiomatic phrases, antonyms and so on. And please also describe the methods for learning such materials.
It's good to have such ideas, no doubt, I appreciate you all contributing your knowledge.
Just a suggestion if someone is looking to make their lesson a bit more interesting. I just prepared a lesson on phrasal verbs using the Paolo Nuttini song " last request. It seems to have alot of phrasal verbs in and as it is quite easy to understand, it could make a good listening lesson!!