A significant part of the English language is made up of phrasal verbs (see? I’ve just used one…) so it is crucial for any learner to face up to them (here’s another one!). Today I’m posting a Powerpoint presentation I created for my intermediate English classes to test their phrasal verbs skills. In the classroom, I like to turn the presentation into a competition, and it all gets rather heated, with each team desperately trying to outdo the other! Why don’t you try out the test to see how well you score?
The presentation includes 40 sentences with blanks which need to be completed with phrasal verbs. Each question slide is followed by the answer, so make sure you don’t peep at the corrections before trying to answer the questions! Here it is: Phrasal verbs challenge
Two ways of learning phrasal verbs:
Phrasal verbs are an essential component of the English language and usually something that is learnt a little at a time. Some people like to focus on the root verb, such as “to set” which can lead to ” to set up”, “to set in” or to set off” etc… Another way of familiarising with phrasal verbs is by focusing instead on the other particles (usually prepositions or adverbs) making up phrasal verbs. For example there are many phrasal verbs combining the root with the particle “out”, such as “to back out”, “to single out”, “to ask out” or “to hear out”, etc..
I hope you enjoy the test!
Phrasal verbs often present a challenge to English learners who try to translate them literally instead of just taking them as having an unexpected meaning. I remember wasting half a lesson trying to explain to Korean students the origin of the phrasal verb “to be fed up with”. In hindsight I wish I’d told them to just memorise it and not worry about the origin! The phrasal verbs challenge you have provided here is an excellent resource which I’ll use in the future to develop students’ fluency with these most challenging of English expressions. Thank you.
Jon Sumner
U.K.
Thank you Jon – I’m glad it will prove useful to you! Another colleague of mine has recently used it in class. She turned it into a competition and said it was great fun! I definitely agree with you about getting students to just memorise phrasal verbs – sometimes they’re counter-intuitive and therefore really difficult to explain.