🧩 Grammar A2-34: Common phrasal verbs

The closing material of the Fleydo A2 grammar series, and the one that makes a learner sound like a speaker rather than a dictionary. It builds on two ideas. The first is meaning: a verb plus a small word is a new verb whose sense you cannot read off the two halves — nothing turns when you turn on a lamp, and look for is not a slower kind of look. Fourteen high-value verbs are laid out in a table with a plain-English meaning and a full example each: get up, wake up, put on, take off, turn on, turn off, look for, look after, pick up, throw away, try on, give back, fill in and find out. The second idea is word order, the only real rule in the topic, given as a formula and a four-step procedure. A noun object may sit in either place — turn on the light or turn the light on — but a pronoun object has exactly one home, in the middle: turn it on, never turn on it. Two worked examples run whole sentences through the steps, one ending in turn it off and one in looked for it, because look for and look after keep their small word glued on and never split. A compare-and-verdict pair sets put on your coat against put it on. Practice is spread over four sets of eight, seven, eight and eight explained items, plus ten verbs to sort by where the pronoun would stand, six real errors to repair and three traps. A tap-and-explain story set in a school lost-property room puts fifteen of them to work in one Saturday morning. Teacher notes give a 45-minute sequence, a card-in-the-gap board move, what to do with a stuck learner, and the Cambridge A2 Key relevance.