Phrasal Verbs: An ESL Book from DK
s a much-needed workbook that provided both a good introduction to phrasal verbs and some good practice exercises for more than 1,000 commonly used examples.
There are six sections of different lengths with different usage topics: “Describing People and Things,” “Everyday Life,” “Work and School,”” Home and Fee Time,” “Communication,” and “Emotions and Situations.” There is one additional section, “Common Verbs,” which has the most common verbs that are combined with particles to form phrasal verbs.
Each section is divided into individual topic lessons of four pages each on topics such as “Clothing,”Making Plans,” and “Business. The book’s exercise pages are clearly formatted and not too difficult. This is the book’s strong point.
The book’s weak point is that it mentions that phrasal verbs often have multiple meanings, depending on the context, but does not delve into them at all. This is related to the most challenging part of teaching ESL vocabulary: multiple-meaning words, also called multiple-use words.
Explaining even seemingly simple multiple-use words takes a great deal of time in a lesson and would have made the book much larger and more complex. This is probably the reason why the authors chose to not elaborate on this aspect of phrasal verbs.
But as a basic introduction to phrasal verbs, Phrasal Verbs: An ESL Book succeeds well and is recommended.
