Phrasal verbs games: a sequence that gets learners using them, not just matching them

Most phrasal verbs games stop at matching. The learner drags "put off" onto "postpone", gets it right, and two weeks later writes "we postponed the meeting" in an email, because the one-word verb feels safer. They recognised it. They never had to produce it.

A phrasal verbs game is only useful if it sits somewhere on the way from recognising to using. This post gives you the list to start with, the order of formats, and example items you can copy into your next lesson.

Which phrasal verbs should you teach first?

Teach the frequent ones first, and fewer than you think. In a corpus study of the 100-million-word British National Corpus, Gardner and Davies found that 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one third of all phrasal verb occurrences, and 100 account for more than half. The same study found that just 20 common verbs combined with eight particles produce more than half of everything.

So the list matters more than the game. A learner who owns 25 high-frequency phrasal verbs hears them everywhere. A learner who half-knows 80 idioms from a textbook unit hears none of them often enough to keep them.

The catch from the same paper: those 100 frequent forms carry potentially 559 senses between them. "Pick up" a parcel, "pick up" a language and "pick up" where you left off are three items, not one. Teach one sense at a time, starting with the one your learner will meet first.

Grouping by particle helps, because many particles carry a loose, learnable meaning:

Particle	Rough meaning	Starter set
up	complete, increase	fill up, use up, speed up, turn up (the volume)
out	discover, remove, run to the end	find out, work out, point out, run out of
off	stop, separate, cancel	turn off, take off, call off, put off
back	return	come back, give back, call back
on	continue	go on, carry on, keep on
down	reduce, lower	sit down, cut down on, turn down

Treat it as a teaching shortcut. "Put off" and "turn up" (arrive) break it, and that is fine: the pattern gets a learner started, and the exceptions get taught as exceptions.

Why isn't matching enough?

Matching can't show avoidance, and many learners avoid phrasal verbs rather than get them wrong. Liao and Fukuya tested Chinese learners of English at two levels and found that proficiency level, whether the phrasal verb was literal or figurative, and the type of test all affected how much learners avoided phrasal verbs.

Avoidance is invisible in a matching game. The learner who avoids "put up with" can still match it to "tolerate" every time. The gap only shows when they have to choose to say it. That is why the sequence below ends with production, not recognition.

A look from applied linguistics

James Nattinger and Jeanette DeCarrico argued that fluent speech runs on prefabricated multi-word units, which a 1994 review of their book summarises as a continuum from fixed idioms you cannot work out from the parts to variable, transparent expressions. Phrasal verbs span that whole continuum in one category: "sit down" is transparent, "put up with" is opaque. So teach them in that order: the literal, physical ones a learner can work out first, then the figurative ones that have to be learned as whole chunks.

Nattinger and DeCarrico, Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching (1992).

What order should the activities go in?

Go from meaning to particle to word order to production, using the same 8 to 12 phrasal verbs at every step. Only the interaction changes, and each one asks a little more of the learner.

Step	Format	Example item	What it trains
1	Match Pairs	put off ↔ postpone	Meaning, recognition
2	Quiz	"They had to call ___ the match because of the rain." (off / up / out)	Choosing the particle
3	Complete the Sentence	"Can you turn the music ___? I'm on a call."	Particle from memory, in context
4	Unjumble	it / turn / please / off → "Please turn it off."	Where the object goes
5	Type the Answer	"The meeting was postponed." → "The meeting was ___ ___."	Swapping the formal verb for the phrasal one
6	Roleplay	"Call your landlord. The heating has stopped working and you need someone to come back tomorrow."	Choosing to use it, unprompted

Step 1 is where most phrasal verbs games live. Here is what that rung feels like from the learner's side.

Step 1: a Match Pairs set

Match each phrasal verb with get to its meaning.

0 of 8 matched. Tap a term, then its match.

get upget byget overget on withget rid ofget throughget away withget round to

leave your bed in the morningmanage with just enough moneyrecover from an illness or a shockhave a good relationship with someoneremove something you no longer wantfinish something difficultdo something wrong and not be punishedfinally do something you kept delaying

Rebuilt with the eight phrasal verbs from your learner's last lesson, that same activity becomes step 1 of their ladder. Students play from a code or a link, with no account, and you see their results per question.

More phrasal verb sets are on our B1 English games page.

Step 4: where the pronoun goes

Separable phrasal verbs have a rule that often trips up advanced learners too: with a pronoun object, the pronoun goes in the middle. "Turn off the light" and "turn the light off" are both fine. "Turn off it" is not. An Unjumble item makes the learner place the pronoun themselves:

• it / pick / up / I'll / later → "I'll pick it up later."
• them / give / back / please → "Please give them back."
• out / it / worked / she → "She worked it out."

In practice, three or four of these in a row are often enough for the pattern to land without a grammar lecture.

Step 5: the swap an avoider dodges

Type the Answer with a formal-to-phrasal swap forces the exact choice an avoider dodges. Give the learner the one-word verb they would naturally use and ask for the phrasal version:

• "Please continue." → "Please ___ ___." (carry on / go on)
• "We have no milk left." → "We've ___ ___ ___ milk." (run out of)
• "I'll discover what happened." → "I'll ___ ___ what happened." (find out)

Accept every correct answer, not just the one you had in mind. "Go on" and "carry on" are both right.

What does a 20-minute online lesson look like?

Five short steps, from Match Pairs to a six-minute roleplay, fit in 20 minutes. For a B1 adult in a one-to-one online lesson, with eight phrasal verbs from a real context (here: dealing with a landlord or a repair):

1. Three minutes, Match Pairs. call back, come round, turn off, look into, put off, sort out, run out of, fill in. Learner matches each to a plain-English meaning.
2. Four minutes, Quiz. Eight gapped sentences from a landlord email. Learner picks the particle.
3. Three minutes, Unjumble. Four pronoun-object sentences: "I'll sort it out", "Can you look into it?"
4. Four minutes, Type the Answer. Formal sentences to rewrite: "Please complete the form" → "Please fill in the form."
5. Six minutes, roleplay. You are the landlord. The learner phones to report a broken boiler and has to get you to come round. Count how many of the eight they use without being asked.

The count in step 5 is your real result. Matching scores in step 1 tend to be high for almost everyone. The roleplay tells you which verbs the learner owns.

For homework, send steps 3 and 4 again as a link two or three days later. Re-testing the same set a few days apart does more than adding new verbs, for the same reason vocabulary review works better spaced.

Which format fits which phrasal verb problem?

Pick the format from what the learner gets wrong:

If your learner...	Use	Because
Doesn't know what it means	Match Pairs, Flashcards	Meaning first, low pressure
Knows the meaning, picks the wrong particle	Quiz, Complete the Sentence	Forces the particle choice in context
Writes "pick up it"	Unjumble	Makes them place the object
Understands phrasal verbs but never uses them	Type the Answer, Roleplay	Makes them choose the phrasal verb themselves
Uses them, but only literal ones	Roleplay with figurative targets	Moves them along the continuum

If you are choosing between recognition and production formats more generally, this comparison of Flashcards, Quiz and Match Pairs covers the same ladder for any vocabulary set.

Sources & further reading

• Pointing Out Frequent Phrasal Verbs: A Corpus-Based Analysis (Gardner and Davies, 2007). TESOL Quarterly. Which phrasal verbs are most frequent in the British National Corpus, and how many meanings they carry.
• Avoidance of Phrasal Verbs: The Case of Chinese Learners of English (Liao and Fukuya, 2004). Language Learning. Why learners avoid phrasal verbs, and which ones they avoid most.
• Review of Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching (1994). Issues in Applied Linguistics. A summary and critique of Nattinger and DeCarrico's account of lexical phrases.