From the room, last lesson
Six sentences collected during the conversations. Four are register — correct English that nobody would say. Two are word order.
Six sentences. One problem each.
1. I will investigate it and revert to you tomorrow.
2. We should postpone the decision until the figures are approved. — in a meeting
3. I have already excluded that option.
4. I ruled out it on Tuesday.
5. Nobody had pursued the authorisation.
6. She dealt it with before lunch.
The finding
Whichever arrives first
Ask anybody in this room what put off means and they will tell you instantly. Ask them what look into, call off, sort out and get back to mean and they will tell you those too. Nothing here is unknown.
And then, speaking, they will say postpone, investigate, cancel, resolve and respond. Not because those are wrong, and not because the phrasal verbs have been forgotten, but because in the half-second available the cognate arrives first — and whatever arrives first is what gets said.
This is a speed problem wearing the clothes of a vocabulary problem, and it is why more vocabulary teaching does not help. You cannot learn a word you already know. What has to change is which of two known items reaches your mouth first, and that only changes through use.
It follows that the target has to be small. Six verbs, used deliberately, in real sentences, over a fortnight, will genuinely change which one arrives. Fifty will not, and the attempt produces the familiar result: another list, understood perfectly, that changes nothing about how you speak.
There is one more thing, and it is audible rather than lexical. Even learners who do produce the phrasal verbs often stress them like two words instead of one item — I TURNED it down rather than I turned it DOWN. The words are right and the phrase is not, and that particular mismatch is one of the clearest markers there is of somebody who learned English from a page.
Three questions.
1. Why does more vocabulary teaching not close this gap?
2. What follows about the size of the target?
3. What is the audible half of the problem?
Three habits, and the sound of a phrase
What actually changes which one arrives first
| Habit | What you do | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Ban six words | Choose six Latinate verbs you overuse and refuse them for a fortnight — in speech, in email, everywhere. | Removing the escape route is the only thing that forces the other item forward. Banning the cognate is more effective than practising the phrasal verb. |
| 2 · Say the pair | Say each phrasal verb with a real object and the right stress: put it OFF · look INTO it · sort it OUT. | The stress is part of the item. A phrasal verb learned silently is learned as two words and produced as two words. |
| 3 · Repair whole | When corrected, say the entire phrase again rather than the missing part. | The unit of storage is the phrase. Repeating one word repairs nothing. |
The stress, one more time, because it is the half nobody practises.
Separable: the particle takes the stress. I turned it DOWN. We called it OFF. She sorted it OUT.
Inseparable: the verb takes it. I LOOKED into it. She DEALT with it.
Three-part: the middle. I can’t put UP with it.
Say your six aloud, with stress, five times each. That is four minutes of work in total and it is the part that transfers.
Use the word in capitals to form a word that fits the gap. All eight are workplace vocabulary.
- The handover was badly from the start. MANAGE
- There was no clear for the delay. ACCOUNT
- The team suffered from chronic over the winter. STAFF
- His is the reason he was given the role. RELY
- The process is unnecessarily . BUREAUCRACY
- She was praised for her in raising it early. INITIATE
- The decision was taken without any . CONSULT
- Morale has been by three reorganisations in two years. MINE
Four questions.
1. Which is more effective: practising six phrasal verbs, or banning six Latinate ones?
2. Where is the stress in I turned it down?
3. Where is it in I looked into it?
4. When corrected, what do you say?
Without the escape route
Eight gaps. The Latinate options are all correct English. Choose the one a colleague would say.
I the meeting until Thursday because the numbers had not . I said I would and by the end of the week. In the end I myself, which took an afternoon, and then the two options that were never going to work. On Friday I what had happened and the number of people on the distribution list.
Eight sentences. Seven need work; one is correct.
1. I shall ascertain the position and communicate it to you.
2. She sorted it out before lunch. — correct as written
3. We turned down it because of the timing.
4. Nobody has followed up it.
5. I cannot tolerate the noise. — to a colleague
6. He dealt it with on Monday.
7. The supplier terminated the arrangement. — the supplier simply withdrew
8. I have not yet had the opportunity to attend to those emails.
The banned list
Task card · Speaking · Pairs · 10 minutes
Talk about your work for five minutes each — with eight words banned.
Five minutes each. Every banned word costs a point, and the point is the record.
- Banned: postpone · investigate · cancel · resolve · respond · reduce · continue · submit.
- Listener: mark each use. Do not interrupt — the count is more useful than the correction.
- Speaker: when you feel one coming, pause rather than substituting something odder. The pause is the work.
- At the end, choose your six — the ones you reached for most — and write a true sentence for each, with the stress marked.
Expect the pauses. A silence where a word used to be is not a failure; it is the gap between two known items being felt for the first time. The phrasal verb is behind that pause, and it gets faster every time you wait for it.
Which words you reached for
Two questions.
1. What happened when a banned word was blocked?
2. How similar was your list of six to your partner’s?
Speed, not knowledge
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What kind of problem is phrasal-verb avoidance?
2. What is the fortnight’s target?
Next. Three hundred and forty words of professional reflection — written, where the escape route is even easier to take.