Page 214 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

200 CHAPTER 8
unds and nominalization) play a prominent role in academic discourse, and learning noun-forming derivational suffixes is essential for L2 academic writers (see also chap. 5 on nouns).
The following examples of such verbs as alternate and approximate and their attendant forms and other words with similar meanings illustrate only a few of the numerous possibilities.
alternate (verb)—alter—alternate (adj.)—alternative (adj./noun)—alter- natively—alternating (current)
Noun relatives: alternative (see adjective form above); alteration—alter- nation—alternator (an engine part)
Similar meanings: modify—change—vary; alternation—modification— change—variation
approximate (verb)—approximate (adj.)—approx. (written abbrevia- tion)—approximately
Noun relatives: approximation (expressions: close/rough approximation) Similar meanings: about, nearly, roughly, close to
Studies of effective techniques for learning L2 vocabulary have demon- strated that words closely related in meaning and/or form are easier to learn and recall than unrelated words or antonyms (Nation, 1990, 2001). Al- though NNS associative word chains or networks do not necessarily approx- imate those of NSs, the learning of L2 words can be made more efficient if
words are grouped by meaning similarities or synonymy because such groupings encourage a development of newword associations. Most impor- tant, however, for the purposes of learning new academic verbs (and other words) to be employed in text production, according to Nation (1990), learners do not need to remember every item in a synonym cluster (e.g., if the word approximately does not immediately come to mind, then easier words such as about or nearly may also work well in a context).
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Constructing university-levelL2 academic prose places great demands on students' lexical and syntactic skills. One of the key domains in L2 vocabu- lary instruction must specifically address learners' range of and fluency with lexical classes of verbs, which are essential in all academic discourse and text. In addition to approximately 40 essential verbs that recur in formalac- ademic prose across various genres and disciplines, 350 foundational verbs need to become a focus of L2 vocabulary teaching.
TLFeBOOK