Multi-word verbs in English Language Teaching: Insights from research and practice

Multi-word verbs are an essential topic for the English language syllabus. As a characteristic feature of the language with numerous semantic and syntactic peculiarities, the category has been found to challenge even advanced learners. Recent evidence-informed pedagogical approaches to multi-word verbs have emerged from several fields of applied linguistics, but it is unclear if these research insights reach classroom practice. This book explores these two matters in turn. It begins with a review of the research in corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and instructed second language acquisition, highlighting their relevance to multi-word verb instruction. It then presents a new study of current approaches to the category in mainstream language education, analysing language teachers cognitions as well as content in popular textbooks. Drawing from this, the author provides a comprehensive vision of the topic and practical applications for improving multi-word verb pedagogy.