Page 203 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

LEXICAL CLASSESOF VERBS 189
(b) Advanced structures with object complements
Smith (2002) presents holds
advocates
the opinion that the position
the view
(c) Advanced constructions with various types of noun clauses and object complements
Their results
The study results
The new findings
help explain explain
challenge
offer
that/how/why the reasons that
the view
the position
the argument that the claim
(the) explanations that
When teaching the uses of reporting verbs in references to sources and literature citations, it may be helpful to present these construc- tions in columns for students to see clearly how the syntactic regulari- ties in these constructions can work to the learners' advantage. That is, by simply replacing the subject noun or the verb with various proxi- mate alternatives, L2 writers can actually come up with a great num- ber of diverse and contextually appropriate expressions.
In real terms, however, few students may need a supply larger than five or six citational expressions, and practicing reporting verbs in the context of ref- erences to sources may help L2 writers become comfortable with their uses.
MENTAL/EMOTIVE (THINKING/FEELING) VERBS
On the whole, mental verbs are not popular in academic prose, and their rate of use in academic prose stands at approximately 0.42% in a large Eng- lish-language corpus (Biber et al., 1999). In general, mental verbs refer to intellectual states (e.g., know, learn, think) and nonobservable intellectual acts (e.g., notice, suspect, trust). Other verbs in this class refer to mental and cognitive processes (compare, calculate, recognize).
The teaching of mental/emotive verbs needs to proceed judiciously.Al- though some of the verbs in this class are relatively common in academic writing, others are hardly ever encountered because they often impart per- sonal and subjective tone to formal discourse. In classroom teaching, the former can be combined with reporting verbs, and the latter should be dis-
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