Types of verb – Phrasal, regular and irregular

The final types of verbs which we’ll cover are Phrasal, Regular and Irregular. Students can often find these difficult, as there are no overall rules that they can use to identify these verbs or construct them for themselves. Teaching these will be more of an on-going process, requiring lots of exposure to them, in a variety of contexts.

Phrasal verbs

Verbs which are made up of several words together are known as phrasal verbs. They are usually formed with a verb combined with an adverb or preposition.

Examples include:

Take off, look into, get away with, or put up with.

Phrasal verbs are often tough for students to understand because it can be difficult to guess their meaning from the separate parts, and one phrasal verb can have lots of different meanings.

For example, a student who knows the word “drag” isn’t always going to be able to guess what “The meeting dragged on.” means. Similarly, a student familiar with “take off” to mean removing clothes, would likely be confused by the sentence “The aeroplane took off at 6.30″.

When teaching these, it can be helpful to use lots of different example sentences to show how these phrasal verbs work in different contexts. And remember that learning these phrases is an ongoing process as students improve their English – don’t try to pile them all on at once!

Regular and irregular verbs

All verbs have three different versions; the present, the past and the past participle. This is something we’ll cover in more detail in the next module.

Regular verbs are those which simply need the addition of “ed” at the end of the word, to be used in the past, or past participle tenses. For example:

Irregular verbs don’t follow this rule – instead the past forms are all different.

Unfortunately, there are no all-encompassing rules for irregular verbs and students mostly just need to memorize them. When teaching students about such verbs, it can help to lay out the different forms as seen in the tables above.