Really Learn 100 Phrasal Verbs & Really Learn 100 More Phrasal Verbs

Abstract

Really Learn 100 Phrasal Verbs edited by Dilys Parkinson. Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 110 pp. Really Learn 100 More Phrasal Verbs edited by Dilys Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 110 pp. Reviewed by Myrna Goldstein Are You in Your English File?® Second Language Learning Research Center, Milan, Italy Oxford University Press (OUP) has produced the second edition of the self- study Really Learn 100 Phrasal Verbs. It is described on the copyright page as a dictionary and has an additional new volume, Really Learn 100 More Phrasal Verbs. Both volumes are suitable for lower intermediate to intermediate learners. They both contain 110 pages and have been edited by the same author. A quick Internet check shows this author to have written other OUP dictionaries, mostly about phrasal verbs and business English in various permutations and combinations. One may therefore assume that the author has specialized in these two areas and has been helping students over the phrasal verb hurdle since at least 2001, when the first OUP book clearly labeled a phrasal verbs dictionary was published. By not having access to this information in these texts, teachers and other personnel responsible for ordering textbooks are unfortunately not aware of how authorita- tive these books may be. Indeed, while browsing through the OUP catalog without peeking inside the covers, these books could easily be written off as just two more short phrasal verb vocabulary texts. The emphasis on the covers is learning 100 phrasal verbs per book; therefore, the appeal is directly to students, since they are most interested in jumping over the phrasal verb barrier. Luckily for the student, these books are authoritative, handy, useful study guides for people plagued by what can often be an overwhelming lexical learning challenge. Unfortunately, until this point there has been no magic methodology for learning phrasal verbs other than by organizing them and attempt- ing to categorize them, hoping to stuff them into one’s long-term memory. For one, meaning often is not related at all to the preposition(s) and particle(s) attached to the base verb. Secondly, there are phrasal verbs with multiple meanings. In addition, phrasal verbs with multiple particles can make learning especially difficult. Indeed, these books seem expressly made with the struggling student in mind. First, they move beyond the standard phrasal verb dictionary by not overwhelming the student. The pages are a handy 6-in. x 9-in. format and the lexical entries have been limited to 100 units per book, each unit one page long covering one phrasal verb. The verbs have been chosen on the basis of high frequency and use. Each unit Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2009, Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 17 No. 1, 75-76