The current project investigated the effects of concept-based instruction (CBI) in phrasal verbs learning. CBI was carefully designed on the basis of two important principles of cognitive linguistics (CL): image-schemas and conceptual metaphors. The analysis focused on conceptual development in the participants who were graduate students registered in an ESL speaking course. Specifically, the influence of the image schema and conceptual metaphor was examined with various data sets. This study focuses on one of the datasets, verbalization tasks. They were provided as a homework assignment to familiarize participants with the new way of understanding particles and phrasal verbs and to internalize the relevant image schemas and conceptual metaphors by externalizing their understanding. The analysis showed that the metaphorical and imagistic associations that students made had a strong impact on their subsequent accounts of the meanings of the phrasal verbs. The metaphorical and imagistic performance of some students demonstrated that CBI can fundamentally impact on learner understanding of the semantics of particles and phrasal verbs.