Vol. 10, Issue 7, Part C (2024)

A phrasal verb is a verb that consists of two or three words. Most phrasal verbs consist of two words: a verb and a particle. Phrasal verbs are an essential part of spoken and written English at all levels. Therefore, every student of English as a Second Language (ESL) needs a basic understanding of them. Concerning the meaning of phrasal verbs, some are very easy to understand, but many phrasal verbs are very idiomatic, which means that a student rarely understands the meaning of a phrasal verb by combining the meaning of its verb and particle, and the whole meaning will be different. It is noted that most of the language students at the Department of Languages, Eastern University, Sri Lanka (EUSL) face difficulties to handle the phrasal verbs. Thus, the researcher of this study believes that the study of phrasal verbs should receive a better treatment which is now using an innovative method than the traditional way as the current pedagogical situation is mostly technology-dependant. Therefore, the researcher developed a student-friendly computational tool to improve the students’ knowledge in phrasal verbs. In this study, twenty first year language students were taken as participants. A pre-test as a traditional method and a post-test with a developed tool were conducted; and the participants showed better outcomes in post-test in comparison to pretest. Then, the findings indicate that using innovative methods can benefit phrasal verb learning and testing, and further enhance students’ independent study.