The Pratical Linguist / Beef up English with phrasal verbs
Vocabulary learning is often thought of as picking up one word at a time. Generations of textbook writers have counted words individually, even taking credit for two words when they use an ｅxpression like "give up," ignoring the fact that the meaning of the total phrase is not representative of the meanings of "give" and "up" taken separately. Yet learning a language is very much a matter of learning how words taken together are more than the sum of their individual meanings.
I define a "multi-word unit" (MWU) as two or more words in a sound sequence that has a certain effect in a discourse community. Linguists have acknowledged the importance of MWUs for many years, but nobody really knows how to organize them, much less teach them. There are hundreds of thousands of them in every language, so it is hard to know where to start teaching. Most teachers have a few pet procedures for teaching a few of them.
In the future, corpus linguistics (computer analyses of large bodies of text) will give us a better handle on the relative frequencies of MWUs, as well as the situations in which they are used. Some of this analysis is being done already, but we need more before we can choose teaching methods that are not stabs in the dark.
When I came to Japan, I found that Japanese people take a certain pleasure in doubling up words like bisho-bisho, meaning dripping wet, or bicha-bicha, an onomatopoeic rendering of a splashing sound. English has a few double words, too, but Japanese has many.
In English, a pleasure similar to that of Japanese double words is to be found in verbs from the Germanic side of English, particularly irregular verbs. This small set of verbs gives rise to an enormous number of MWUs, such as phrasal verbs and other idioms. The MWUs seem to give native speakers an extra little kick of satisfaction. Unfortunately, the same MWUs seem to scare the dickens out of our Japanese students.
In my Vocabulary and Reading Fluency class, I make sure that one recurring theme consists of MWUs from Old English verbs. I start out with a little history about the two sides of English: the earlier Old English base with its short, strong words, and the later overlay from Latin and French, with its longer, rather too-delicate-sounding words (compare "work," from Old English with "employment," from Old French).
The students and I run through sets of irregular verbs, saying them in unison according to the patterns of their original conjugations. on a given day, you might find us chanting forms such as:
sing sang sung
sink sank sunk
spin span spun
spring sprang sprung
stink stank stunk
and so on, enjoying the feeling of these sounds as they roll off our tongues.
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Phrasal verbs
I explain to students that phrasal verbs are two-word or three-word verbs, typically made of one Old English verb plus an extra word that I call an "elaborator." Even if you know the meaning of the parts, it is hard to know the meaning of the whole until somebody tells you. But once you catch on to them, phrasal verbs slip rather easily into memory. I show the students that the spoken stress is on the elaborator rather than on the verb, so you can always tell when you are hearing a phrasal verb.
And I tell them that, like Japanese double words, phrasal verbs are enjoyable. If you ask someone the meaning, he or she is usually happy to fill you in. Dictionaries of phrasal verbs offer thousands of them, typically from 4,000 to 14,000. But it is hard to list or count phrasal verbs because they are always appearing and disappearing.
With so many phrasal verbs in English, there are some questions that are difficult to answer: Which ones should we teach? Where should we start? How should we teach them? Lots of people are trying to figure out the answers to these questions.
I think it is important to try to give students a feeling for phrasal verbs. I have been trying out several methods of doing that.
Some have worked better than others.
The other day, I divided the whiteboard into four sectors and wrote an irregular verb in each sector: "give," "make," "do" and "bring." I asked the students, in teams, to go to the board and write as many phrasal verbs as they could, using their assigned verbs. They did that rather happily, whipping out their electronic dictionaries and ending up with six to 10 phrasal verbs for each verb.
Perhaps I was the only person in the room who was surprised. I didn't expect the dictionaries. Upon reflection, I realized that the dictionaries were appropriate. I had called for language output far beyond the students' capacities; they quickly turned to this electronic aid and clued each other in on how to find phrasal verbs.
Most of their dictionaries had a "phrasal verb" section after the regular entries for each verb (I did not know that; technology moves so quickly). Now the students are good at looking up phrasal verbs and also, I suspect, impressed with the number of them. They are getting a feeling for phrasal verbs and adding in a 21st-century technological assist for coping with them.
One student woke me up by straying outside the territory of phrasal verbs. Among the "give" phrasal verbs, she wrote "give me a break." At first I was disappointed because I thought I had clearly specified phrasal verbs and "give me a break" is not a phrasal verb but a different kind of MWU.
But, as I was stalking toward the board, eraser in hand, I thought, "She is into the spirit of the thing, and the spirit embraces idioms." Just in time, I realized that I should not go grumbling to the front of the room and insist on tight formal definitions at the very moment when students were getting into the mood I wanted.
I think students can develop a feeling for the kinds of meanings that elaborators typically contribute. For example, "up" often contributes a meaning of increasing or completing something, "down" has to do with decreasing or stopping, "through" often implies success or perseverance.
Without thinking the matter through, I tried a matching exercise on my students. on the left were 14 phrasal verbs ending with "up," most of which they did not know, and on the right were 14 meanings. This proved to be one of the most soporific exercises I have ever given out. More than half the students could hardly keep their eyes open, and the remaining students made very little progress. I called off the exercise.
Later, I figured out what had gone wrong--something I should have known. As I had already said to them, you don't know the meaning of a phrasal verb until somebody tells you. Sure enough, they didn't know the meaning of most of the verbs because I hadn't told them. Small wonder they lost interest!
The next day, I set the students up with a little story about a day in the life of a very lazy student. In cloze style, I blanked out 13 words and explained to students that the 13 missing words were phrasal verbs with "up" as their elaborators. At the bottom of the page were the 13 phrasal verbs with definitions. Some of them were difficult, like "dolled up" and "get up for."
At this, my students perked up. The student who had written "give me a break" asked if it was OK to go to the board to write the answers. Of course, I said yes (I may be slow, but I had caught on that they get a kick out of going to the board). So we got the exercise done, and my role was to roam the classroom and offer advice on nuances. At the end, we needed to fix up two or three entries on the board, but the students got through the exercise with flying colors.
I think learning phrasal verbs is important. I am still trying to improve my techniques of teaching them, but I offer this progress report now in the hope of stirring up interest and perhaps getting some feedback.
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I count 29 phrasal verbs in this column. Send e-mail to childs@tuj.ac.jp. The column will return on April 13.
Childs, Ed.D., teaches TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) and other subjects at Temple University, Japan Campus.