Job Discussion Forums

[Yawarakaijin]

I had noticed it a little when I was teaching in Canada but never so much as when I started teaching in Japan. Whenever I have a class on phrasal verbs I tend to get either one of two reactions.

1.) Sorry teacher I have no idea what you are talking about.
2.) A dejected/bored look comes over their face like I'm about
to teach them something that they deem totally useless.

Have any of you come across this? Most of my students have put in the hours when it comes to English. Are they just forgetful dolts? Do their teachers ever teach them the importance of using but primarily understanding phrasal verbs? Is it one of the reasons their comprehension/communicative abilities seem to be so low?

In my mind phrasal verbs are such an important aspects of our language and one of the most interesting I might add. Sadly for English learners it is quite difficult as well. What is a student to make of...

I ran into my friend on the weekend.
and
I ran into a wall on the weekend.

or maybe

I put my cat out. ( because it was annoying me)
and
I put my cat out. ( because it was on fire )


Anyone else have some others?

[abufletcher]

First, I hope you're not expecting your students to know a bit of metagrammatical lingo like "phrasal verb." I see no reason to burden students with such jargon. I find that the longer I teach EFL (and it's been 24 years so far) the less grammar-lingo I use. Why I haven't said the words "past participle" in class in over a decade!

And I can't really imagine any more boring topic for a lesson that "today we are going to study phrasal verbs."

As you say there are a good number of phrasal verbs in English (vestiges of our Germanic past) but I think the real problem is that so many of them are bound up with idioms.

This is where a lexical approach to language teaching really comes into its own.

[Yawarakaijin]

Well Abufletcher perhaps I couldh have listed my student's response to the introduction to the concept of phrasal verbs a little better.

Although I said " when I have a class regarding phrasal verbs" and not "when I ask my students what a phrasal verb is" student response #1 may have lead you to believe that that is what indeed happened and I will be more precise in the future.

Perhaps, "when introduced to the concept and rules of phrasal verbs many of my students acted like it was the first time they had heard of it," would have been a more exact approximation of what I meant to get across.


[quote]And I can't really imagine any more boring topic for a lesson that "today we are going to study phrasal verbs

If this quote is a general idea I would have to agree with you 100%.
If however it was a critique of my supposed teaching technique I find it slightly offensive as I never stated I started my class in this manner.

The main thrust of my argument was that I found it slightly odd that many of my students have had an aversion/dumfounded reaction when it came to phrasal verbs and I was curious as to why that would be so.

I totally agree that the last thing a student needs is uselsess jargon rammed down their throat. I imagine they get that enough in middle and highschool. Phrasal verbs however, are an integral part of the English language. Exactly how much of a conversation between two native speakers would a Japanese person understand if they were not familiar with the usage of phrasal verbs?

[canuck]

Initially, I had the same thoughts as abufletcher. Why don't you be more specific about how you started your lesson, Yawarakaijin? In order to to avoid reactions #1 or #2, you'll need to disguise it in some way.

Don't think that your students are "forgetful dolts". How often do you practice the material? How often do you review what you've taught?

[abufletcher]

Sorry I was a little abrupt...it had been a long day.

My own opinion is that phrasal verbs should be treated like any other vocabulary items and just introduced in a contextually relevant way. Which is to say, I don't think I'd dedicate any particular lesson exclusively to them. Also while there are some "rules" to the use and meaning of phrasal verbs it's an extemely messy area of English and I don't think I'd try to teach much about the semantic differences between the "down" in "burn down" and the "up" in "burn up."

If fact about the only thing I might specifically do would be some kind of "noticing" activity about the two possible locations for the attached preposition.

It would be interesting to look at some actual conversational data and see just how frequently phrasal verbs actually get used. My intuition (based on having looked at hundreds of pages of actual transcripts in the process of doing my Ph.D. in the field of Conversation Analysis) is that they may not be as common as people imagine.

Which is not to say that they shouldn't be taught -- but that they may not be particularly more relevant than other vocabulary items. Actually, I also have a problem with teaching of individual vocabularly items. Work coming out of the field of corpus linguistics suggests that vocabularly is much more usefully acquired when taught in lexical chunks that include commonly collocating words. For example, a quick search of the Cobuild demonstration corpus shows that overwhelmingly the most common collocation for "burn down" is "house." And that "put out" collocates most strongly with "fire/blaze/flames/light/cigarette/statement"

The point here is that perhaps the phrasal verb itself is only half the story!

[Yawarakaijin]

[The point here is that perhaps the phrasal verb itself is only half the story![/quote]

I could not agree more. I also agree that teaching these verbs in lexical sets is also very important. Particular phrasal verbs can have quite a few idiomatic meanings and I was just thinking to myself how confusing some of these must be to language learners. I would also be interested in the frequency of usage.

The whole thing came up when a student of mine was having a particularly difficult time understanding an episode of FRIENDS. She enjoys watching sit-coms to try and "get the feel" of English. As we reviewed the episode in question and the transcripts of the show it became obvious that she was having serious difficulties with phrasal verbs. I guess I was just a little shocked that she had not come across them previously. She is a very diligent student and has quite a high comprehension level. In that one episode there were approximately 25 phrasal verbs, some quite easy to comprehend due to context, others not so, especially when they were of the seperable sort.

For canuck.. I don't really consider my students dolts it was said kind of tongue in cheek. As for Yawarakaijin... well its a name one of my japanese friends came up with while drinking. Sadly my stomach is a little softer than i would like (yawarakai) and I am a Gaijin hence I have become Yawarakaijin

[dove]

I have also noticed Japanese students' reluctance and aversion to phrasal verbs. I think most students consider phrasal verbs as a kind of slang; they fear using them will "lower" their English. So they don't study them, and as a result, they cannot understand most exchanges with native speakers. They certainly cannot understand most movies and TV shows. (And it is so ironic--you wouldn't believe how many students tell me that the reason they want to learn English is to understand "Friends").

It's interesting that my Brazilian students (and my Brazilian roommate) love learning phrasal verbs. If they hear me using a phrasal verb they don't recognize, they usually ask me about it....sometimes they can guess the meaning fom context....I wish my Japanese students could do that.

[kdynamic]

Maybe pointing out that phrasal verbs in English are just as important as compound verbs in Japanese would help them draw some kind of parallel and see that they are a key part of English? I know the two verb types aren't the same thing at all, but I have found pointing out sort of similar features in Japanese helps my students feel ready to plunge into different areas of English.

[ndorfn]

I'm taking off my shirt.

The plane is taking off.

maybe.

[Dooly]

I think a lot of students are put off by phrasal verbs because there are so many of them and they can have so many meanings. Or they may have been given long lists of them to memorize, which would turn anyone off!

Also, as other people have mentioned, students are often taught only "formal" English, so they may not even be aware that phrasal verbs are an important part of conversation.

BTW, there are some pretty good lesson plans for phrasal verbs at onestopenglish.com.