The paper assesses the use of multi-word verbs in written English by students of the Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi. For its theoretical emphasis on forms and functions of grammatical items in communication, the structural grammar model description of features and meanings of English multi-word verbs provides the basis for assessment of the student’s use of the items; using the structural model, a proficiency test, tagged Uses of Multi-word verbs in English, is developed and administered to randomly selected forty-nine first-year Use of English students. The results, using frequency, percentage and mean for data analysis, show that the students are deficient in using multi-word verbs as they cannot provide the contextual synonyms for these multi-word verbs in the test items: come on, break down, go off, die away, get back, getting by, catch on, watch out, eat out, hang on (intransitive phrasal verbs); sort out, knock over, set off, blow up, put off, throw away, give away, take of, leave out ( transitive phrasal verbs); look for, look into, fall for, stand for, approve of, do without, bombard with, break into, come across, look after (prepositional verbs); catch up with, go on with, look forward to, watch out for, fix up with, put that down to, take out on, looked up to, fob off, comes down to (phrasal prepositional verbs). The study establishes that some undergraduates cannot use English multi-word verbs and therefore recommends teaching and drills on multi-multi-word verbs for effective use of English.
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