Luke's Pre-Int phrasal verbs

I had an interesting class yesterday - if I was better at self-delusion I'd say it was the proof of the pudding, though one caveat is that the 'live' material we used is fairly unique to London. However, the interesting thing is that my colleague Peter has been teaching them for several weeks along the lines we've been discussing - which may explain how easily things fell into place in the second lesson.

I'll write down the procedure and what emerged.

Level: Pre Intermediate (ie, competent - level 2 out of the 3 I'm prepared to accept! A feature of these students English which many articulate is its inconsistency, ie on some days or in the right mood they can be pretty fluent, at other times the words don't come. Maybe the same is true of anything you don't practice enough - once you have done something enough and been exposed to enough useful input, it becomes more consistent. Scott, have any linguists looked into consistency as a mark of competence (ie not sentence level or even discourse level performance, but over-time and in different circumstances).

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1

[There were 7 students. I knew some but not all and asked them to find out enough about each other to introduce each other by Name, Hometown, Occupation at home and Occupation in London. I noted down throughout this and the following conversation the language they used which needed work or could provide good models. This information is essential to this kind of teaching - no surprise I'm sure to teachers of school-age students, but how many adult learners remain Intermediate Marco from Roma to their teacher forever?

When we had introduced each other and I had taught and they had used stuff like 'This is ...' and 'S/he's reading [at university]' I said we would all be writing a question to ask the other students in the class; the question could be anything from what people had for breakfast to the meaning of life. And in fact the questions did range from eg What did you do at the weekend, through Who's your favourite actor, to What's most important to you in life. Again, I checked the questions, which they wrote down, and noted language points for later, including a question raised by one student about when to use the -ing form.

Then everyone stood up and asked each other the questions, noting the answers to my question by name. I had written one and participated like everyone else. Then we reported what people had said, though I didn't insist on the tense shift, I was more concerned with word order. Some pronunciation points had arisen and I've found all students are fascinated by analysing and working on connected speech. I reckon there's a real conceptual gap for learners between some structures (eg would have been) and the way they are spoken - (wouldabin) - which means they don't recognise the structure when they hear them - so they don't even get passive practice let alone active.

I then said I had noted some langauge points and did they have any more they wanted covered during the week. I noted these, several times asking them for more ideas when ideas seemed to have dried up and prompting one student at length who had said something to a fellow student in her own langauge but was shy of speaking up. The following emerged, in no order: future perfect, conditionals 1-2-3, using -ing endings [aspect], verbs followed by to / -ing, which tense to use for narrative, phrasal verbs with get and go. I was able to answer someone's query about the phrase 'How are you doing?'; she had heard this repeatedly working as a hotel receptionist and guessed the meaning from the context but wasn't sure what the words were. Then we took a break.

2

After the break we were chatting. Two more students (one more or less incompetent, the other almost proficient) had joined so instead oif sitting with the students I was in front of the board. The sequence that developed was as follows:-

During the previous conversation a student had said cartoons were the most important thing in her life and she had drawn a large picture of Snoopy on the board; I was going to start looking at the language points I had noted down using the board and said 'do you mind if I get rid of it' and asked them to say what I'd just said: they said 'do you mind if I rub it out'. I then said we could get rid of many things eg unwanted bits of paper, a flatmate (one of the questions had been 'Do you get on with your flatmate'), a cough; and that this flexibility was typical of phrasal verbs (one of the requests had been for examples of phrasal verbs with get and go). EG at this stage I was managing the lesson using language that had emerged by referring it back to our previous conversation and needs expressed by the students.

I asked them what they needed to get rid of, focusing on the connected speech (ge'ridda) and drilling that. Students made up their own sentences. I then wrote up other, associated phrasal verbs: throw out, rub out. I said sometimes word order was an issue amd wrote egs for rub out (rub Snoopy out, rub him out, rub out Snoopy, NOT rub out him).

I said phrasal verbs were flexible in terms of meaning (literal/figurative) and in terms of their word order. I said to learn the possible word orders they needed as much exposure to phrasal verbs in context as possible; I said they should read the paper. Had anyone read a paper today (yes; Metro, a free paper given out at London tube stations and characterised by the blandness of its journalism - a bit boring for us but perfect practice for competent students).

One student said he'd read an interesting story in Metro and showed us - this was a great story about TV/radio mogul Chris Evans taking in a Soho prostitute and offering her his cash and protection only for her to go back to the streets. Perfect because the schema was shared by everyone (they'd all seen Pretty Woman, to which reference was made in the headline, in the photos - a large shot of Julia Roberts - and of course in the text itself).

After chatting about the story a little I said we could go through the phrasal verbs together; I would have been standing by the board reading out the text and asking them to 'stop' me at phrasal verbs.

At this point a student said: 'We've got 3 copies, we can do it in groups.' Another copy materialised (they were all from the students) and so they worked in groups. So they'd not only produced the material but organised the activity! This went on until we put our work together on the board. The following phrasal verbs emerged:

/ live with / someone

/ come off / the street /

give up / prostitution

/ lock / s.o. / out /

/ go on / forever

By working through the material together, we shared the process of deciding which were useful, transferable phrasal verbs (as above), which were longer fixed expressions (it would take a lot for me to do something like that) and which weren't phrasal verbs after all (... asking her to leave after an unfortunate chain of events).

They identified not too few but too many phrasal verbs in the text, and hopefully they learned more about the language, as I did, from the process of elimination.

I had no idea what was going to come out of this lesson; all I knew when I walked in was that I had my pens, I was looking forward to it and I was going to find out the students' names, hometowns and occupations. We ended up chatting part of the time, doing a fairly conventional conversation exercise using the students' own questions, doing some work on connected speech, learning some phrasal verbs and a little about what phrasal verbs are and how they work, talking about how the students could help themselves by reading and identifying language use, using a text to do this, and noting language questions the students wanted to raise. I wouldn't pretend the development in part 2 would happen every time; it was fun and satisfying, but if I'd brought in the article myself and told them to comb it for phrasal verbs would it have mattered? (What do you think?) If there had only been one copy and I'd made 3 photocopies?