Phrasal verbs are a notoriously difficult feature of English for most EFL/ESL learners to master. In addition to formal instruction, frequent exposure to these forms could at the very least foster their receptive learning. There are different sources, such as movies, music, games and books, which can provide learners with exposure to the most common phrasal verbs in English. This study aims to investigate the degree to which music can play a role in exposing learners to phrasal verbs through analyzing their frequency in song lyrics from different genres (i.e., Pop, Rock, Hip-hop and Metal). For this purpose, a corpus of 400 song lyrics by different artists from these four genres was searched for all existing phrasal verbs. The resulting list of phrasal verbs was compared to Garnier and Schmitt’s (2015) Phrasal Verb Pedagogical List in order to determine their value for EFL/ESL learners. Further comparisons were subsequently drawn between different genres to determine which could be of greater use to language instruction. The results revealed that since more than half of the phrasal verbs found in the corpus can be considered pedagogically-useful, song lyrics can potentially be a beneficial source for learning these constructions. Observed differences in the type and token frequency of phrasal verb among the four genres can also be used to determine the usefulness of that particular genre to students from various levels of proficiency. The findings of this study can be of interest to language teachers and learners who wish to exploit music for the purpose of learning and teaching phrasal verbs.

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