Page 192 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

178 CHAPTER8
In this chapter, the most essential academic verbs are highlighted. Then a foundational set of approximately 350 verbs is discussed in some detail because they constitute one of the keys to NNS students' production of uni- versity-level text (Jordan, 1997; Nation, 1990). This chapter also deals with context and discourse functions of several lexical classes of verbs that can noticeably improve the quality of students' academic prose.
WHAT ARE LEXICAL VERBS?
In general terms, lexical verbs have been divided into several large classes that have been assigned different labels and components depending on the purpose of a particular classification. Because this book is primarily con- cerned with functions of verbs in L2 academic prose, the specific labels of constituent verbs are not greatly important. However, because some sort of verb labeling is necessary, whenever possible, the discussion follows the ter- minology adopted in many ESL student textbooks. In addition, because textbook classifications do not always examine verb types in sufficient de- tail, some of the labels rely on those developed by Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999). In teaching lexical verbs to L2 learners, the transparency of the labels is of greatest importance.
Some analyses of lexical verbs identify as many as 30 semantic classes and others around a dozen. However, only five are particularly important in L2 instruction: activity verbs, reporting verbs, men- tal/emotive verbs, linking verbs, and logical-semantic relationship verbs (the functions and uses of modal verbs are discussed in chap. 12 on hedging). In actual classroom teaching, these labels can be further simplified for students:
• "doing" verbs (activity)
• "speaking" verbs (reporting)
• "thinking/feeling" verbs (mental/emotive)
• "being/becoming" verbs (linking)
• "relationship" verbs (logical-semantic relationship)
Verbs in different lexical and semantic classes do not play the same role in teaching L2 academic writing, and some are more important than others. For example, few activity and mental/emotive verbs are actually encoun- tered in academic text, but linking and logical-semantic relationship verbs are a great deal more common. In addition, although many simple activity and mental/emotive verbs (e.g., do, feel, think] are so common that they can be learned in daily living, logical-semantic relationship verbs are far more advanced and need to be taught.
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