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Phrasal verbs can be a pretty messy business. While giving rules for tenses and comparatives and the like is fairly straightforward, hard and fast rules for phrasal verbs are hard to come by, and if you don’t watch your step you can easily end up confusing and demoralizing your students.

 

Yet phrasal verbs do permeate the language, particularly the more colloquial variety, the kind used for almost all spoken communication, so students do come across them all the time and usually take them in stride. This being the case, you can deal with them the same way you deal with other lexis: highlight them when they come up along with their collocations, then move on. Treat them as chunks of language.

 

For example, say in a lower level class you’re looking at phrasal verbs with “turn”, so perhaps a useful chunk of language would be “Shall I turn up / down the volume?”, “Shall I turn on / off the radio?” Actually at this point you may want to ask them what other words they think collocate with “turn on”. This is sometimes useful because students can try out their ideas, for example, you can “turn on the TV / the light / the heat / the air conditioning”, but you can’t “turn on your car”; you obviously “start up your car”.

 

When teaching phrasal verbs like this, there’s really no need to go into the minefield of whether this particular type has an object or not, or is separable or not. Just get them to learn (memorize) the chunk in question, for example, “Shall I turn off the radio?” This also completely avoids the issue of what happens when the object of the phrasal verb is a pronoun, that is, you can say “turn it off” but not “turn off it”.

 

This is what I mean when I say phrasal verbs are messy. You risk opening a Pandora’s box if you try to tackle this fiddly grammar too soon. But happily there’s no real need to: you can treat, “Shall I turn off the radio” as a chunk of language and leave well enough alone. Perhaps another day they’ll come across, “I’ll turn it off”, and then you can give a fast and friendly explanation of the variations, “I’ll turn the radio off” and “I’ll turn off the radio”, but for God’s sake, don’t get bogged down by this.

 

Again, it’s vital that they come away with practical, useful chunks of language like, “Shall I turn off the radio?”. Then later when you complicate the grammar they’ll already have been using phrasal verbs and hopefully be familiar with the examples you’re using. This will go far to bypass the confusion and demoralization that students so often feel when confronting this (for them) arcane grammar.

 

By the way, what we’re seeing here illustrates why lexis comes before grammar in the Lexical Approach. The lexis itself, the chunks of language, bring along its own grammar as we’ve been seeing, so if students learn “I’ll turn it down”, as part of the package they also get “will” for spontaneous decisions, and “turn it down”: the verb + object pronoun + particle.

 

If you approach this from the other direction and actually start out by writing on the board “verb + object pronoun + particle”, you’ll surely frighten your poor students off. And if they do stick it out, they’ll have learned some theory but not how to put it into practice. For that you’ll have to go back to useful chunks of language, which should have been your starting point anyway.

 

Meanwhile, long grammar explanations are normally a waste of valuable classroom time. So steer clear of the phrasal verb quicksand of over-analysis and instead give them useful chunks of language with minimal analysis. You won’t regret it.

 

I’ve been thinking it’s time to change the channel and turn the spotlight on the Lexical Approach and on my favorite in-class activity, picking out collocations from texts.

 

Finding interesting collocations and chunks of language is certainly time well spent. Actually I do my best to train my students to find (“notice”) them themselves. This can actually take a bit of doing because they usually view language as a string of isolated words rather than as words that often go together. It’s so typical: you’re looking at a text and they ask you what this or that word means, but they fail to notice useful groups of words that will help them express themselves better.

 

Just today in class there was what I consider a classic. In a recorded dialogue someone said, “it’s difficult to get a word in edgeways”. (By the way, that’s “edgewise” in my neck of the woods.) So one of my students asks me what “edgeways” means. I’ve only ever heard that word as part of that idiom. A better-trained student would have asked me what the whole expression means. But give me time.

 

I read a good metaphor in one of Michael Lewis’s book: meaning is like a chocolate bar. Students unpackage the meaning and go for the chocolate, but forget about the package the chocolate / meaning came in. They try to understand the message, but forget the way it was expressed. This needs to be pointed out to them, or better yet, they need to be trained to notice these language items for themselves. I view this as a large part of our job: helping students notice how words go together. It’s not easy, but it’s gratifying when it flies.

 

If you want to, just for fun, reread this post up to here and decide what collocations you think might be worth highlighting for an advanced-ish class. Then we’ll compare notes.

 

Finished? OK, here’s what I came up with. The first sentence, “I’ve been thinking…” or “I’ve been thinking it’s time to…”. This can be treated as a chunk of language, with no or minimal grammatical analysis. You can also personalize it: “I’ve been thinking it’s time to do a listening. Do you agree?” Try to draw the students in.

 

Also, “change the channel”. You could mention the literal meaning, actually changing channels on a TV, and the metaphorical meaning here, to do something different. Ask your students if they think it’s time to change the channel in class, or in other ways.

 

The collocations just go on and on: “turn the spotlight on”, “time well spent”, “do my best”, “take a bit of doing”, “They usually view … as …”, “It’s so typical”, “this or that”, “what I consider a classic”, “get a word in edgeways”, “By the way”, “in my neck of the woods”, “give me time”, “chocolate bar”, “go for…”, “language items”, “I view this as…”, “a large part of my job”.

 

In the Lexical Approach, I’d say more time is spent on collocations than on traditional grammar, but I do like the current trend of having a quick look at a grammar item, then moving on. Actually grammar can often be treated as a chunk of language as we did with the present perfect continuous above (“I’ve been thinking…”). You could do the same for verb plus infinitive: “fail to notice”, “needs to be pointed out”.

 

And there’s more you could do with it, buy obviously you don’t have to point everything out to them, but I will confess I do relish getting my hands on a lexically rich text and ripping it to shreds. It’s demanding on the students’ memory, but who said learning English is a cakewalk?

 

I find myself having to explain to them again and again why we’re highlighting so many language chunks: “This is very practical language. This is how people really speak. Do you want to improve your level or not?” They moan they can’t possibly remember so much lexis. I tell them to study and revise as much as possible, and just do the best they can.

 

A lot of this ends up being passive knowledge (they recognize it and understand it, but can’t produce it), but that aids comprehension and is dead useful for Cambridge exams. I also encourage students to choose their “favorite” collocations: the ones they think are the most useful for them, or just the ones they like, and to try to use them in follow-up fluency activities, which helps them activate at least some of the lexis.

 

By the way, a highly-recommended book with excellent practical examples is “Teaching Collocations”, edited by Michael Lewis and published by LTP. For a more theoretical view, get “The Lexical Approach” and Implementing the Lexical Approach”, both excellent but more academic.

 

There’s more to say about all this, but I’ll wind things up here. This post is already about twice as long as I’d intended. Anyway, if you’re not already doing so in your classes, turn the TV to the lexical channel and put the spotlight on collocations.

Rob in Madrid

 

Good! Now can you explain phrasal verbs?

 

 

I remember I was once a fledgling EFL teacher; yeah, that wasn’t just yesterday either, in fact it was during “la movida” here in Madrid. And I think it was also about the time the internet was just taking off and I was wondering what all the fuss was about. I guess now I know as I sit here pecking out my latest entry in my blog on Madrid Teacher, which is a very cost effective way of finding students.

 

Anyway, I had this one-to-one with a big fish in a bank who only seemed to want conversation. So the first couple of classes went OK, but then he started fading away and then massively missing classes. So as a teacher, I had to wonder what was up. Was my scintillating conversation not up to snuff?, or maybe he just felt he wasn’t really progressing. I hope it was the latter because that’s where I’m going today.

 

But first, I’d just like to say I occasionally meet teachers who basically do conversation classes and that’s it. That always kind of blows me away because here I am fretting about giving well-rounded classes, hitting all the bases, making sure they have language input, skills work, adapting to different personality types, language needs, learner expectations, past learning experiences, the six R’s, what have you; and here’s this guy saying, “To hell with all that, I’m just gonna talk to ‘em. That’s all they need.” How do they get away with that? Actually as a teacher I know students sometimes have very different learning styles, maybe teachers do too, and can get away with that.

 

And another thing, it’s surprising what students get used to. Maybe these students think, “This is it. This is state-of-the-art English teaching. Now I’m on the road to fluency”. This must also happen at the other end of the spectrum in certain own-method academies where, at the end of the day, their methodologies are narrow, and I suspect many were out to lunch during the communicative revolution as well. So do these students just not know better, or do they actually prefer this? Different horses (as the Brits say).

 

Well, getting back to the business at hand, the big fish that got away from me, I was saying it’s important for students to feel they’re progressing. One way to do this is to slot in some hard work in every class, or at least every now and then. I’m talking about some let’s-really-get-down-and-look-at-how-English-works activities.

 

Now as you can imagine, this is not without its dangers. In fact, some students who are used to being mollycoddled may freak out on you; and you also get tired out business people who want to take it easy. This can be a tough call because often if you’re tough on them, in the end they’ll thank you for “making them learn”. Again, a tough call: what do they really want: a “light” English class, or to go into the breach?

 

For me most of these grunt classes tend to be lexical where we have a look at a text and spend time noticing collocations, idioms and expressions. By the way, many books have lexically rich texts, but my favorite is Innovations advanced, which at times is just brilliant: it’s amazing how much you can get out of just one text.

 

But getting back to danger, when you really milk a text like this, it won’t normally be the bouncy, dynamic part of your class, and you have to be careful not to push too hard lest things become a drudgery. In fact, we were deep in a text last week when one girl put her head down on her desk and looked like she had a headache. But afterwards another girl commented on how useful it all was because this is the language she comes across when she reads and travels. Vindicated! And I thought this really separated the women from the girls.

 

But obviously we’re not slave-drivers: teaching is our bread and butter, so the bottom line is happy students. I’d say we have to develop an intuition on how hard we can push them, and we won’t always be right. But let’s just face facts here, TEFL in not for the faint-hearted; so once more, dear teachers, I bid you go into the breach, once more, expose them to language, let them see their lexical shortcomings.

I always kick off my classes with revision cards. On slips of paper I write sentences in which I have underlined the target lexical item. Students cover the underlined word with their finger and try to elicit the word from their partner, a bit like taboo. I really like it: you pick several flowers with one cut (a humanistic variation of the more violent two-birds-with-one-stone idiom). Students warm up and revise, and it gives you (the teacher) a chance to settle in. Anyway, today my students had their homework out and immediate starting commenting on it. And I wondered, is this a coincidence or are they trying to tell me something?

 

This is an hour long class with two proficiency students; I mean they’ve already passed that IQ test, so they’re awesome language learners, lexical superstars, testimony of what hours of effective language teaching can do. Or did they reach these linguistics heights in spite of us? Maybe I should ask them.

 

Anyway, they always ace the lexis because they’re such responsible, conscientious, hardworking students: homework’s always done, lexis revised, they’re primed and ready to go: for an hour. By the way, don’t get me wrong. I don’t even take hour-long classes unless they’re back-to-back with another class, which is the case here.

 

Anyway, maybe these two super students don’t really need my lexis cards. Besides, in an hour class you have to move right along if you want to give them language work, a listening, and some fluency work. When it comes to the ABCs of language teaching, I think the A could be “adapt”. I’ll try to think of something for B and C.