As a teacher, I know very well how students feel about phrasal verbs as there are so many. But although phrasal verbs are very commonly used in English, I don’t recommend learning them by heart – I mean sitting for ages in front of a paper with lists and lists of them. Rather than this, I’d try to use two new ones in each class and bit by bit, students would get familiar with them, as well as knowing how to use them. Another additional difficulty about learning phrasal verbs, is that the meaning of these chunks of words, rely very heavily on the sentence in which they appear. An example of this is ‘lock up’. If this appears in in a sentence related to a place, it means to close a business for the day, but if it appears in a sentence related to a person, it could mean to hold a person captive.

In this blog post I want to try out a new tool with my students in order to foster self-study. I’ve used GoConq to create a mind map with common phrasal verbs that belong to the topic of work within intermediate levels (B1 and B2). In each section of the mind map, you’ll find a quiz related to the phrasal verbs that have been included and in the first part of the diagram, a short note on the meaning of each one.