Page 215 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

LEXICAL CLASSES OF VERBS 201
Overall, most verbs employed in academic texts can be roughly divided into five lexical classes: activity verbs, reporting verbs, mental/emotive verbs, linking verbs, and logical-semantic relationship verbs. In L2 text pro- duction, lexical verb classes do not have an equal importance (e.g., activity verbs and mental/emotive verbs play a less central role than reporting, link- ing, and logical-semantic relationship verbs). Therefore, the bulk of in- struction in academic vocabulary dealing with verb functions and uses in formal prose needs to concentrate on the latter lexical classes.
In particular, reporting verbs play an instrumental role in demonstrating familiarity with readings, referring to sources, and citations of published works. These academic discourse tasks, as well as paraphrasing material from reading and literature, constitute a requisite component of formal academic discourse. Because academic text largely deals with descriptions of states and reports of abstract relationships among entities and events, linking verbs and logical-semantic relationship verbs are far more common in formal written prose than in any other genre. Hence, the teaching of appropriate contextual uses of relatively lexically simple linking verbs and, on the other hand, com- plex relationship verbs is crucial in L2 vocabulary and grammar instruction.
A variety of effective pedagogical approaches to vocabulary teaching have been developed during the decades of vocabulary research:
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The most valuable techniques entail helping learners build seman- tic domains (or associative networks) of verbs that are synonyms or near synonymsand that can provide readily accessible contextual substitutions in discourse.
Teaching verb collocations with nouns, particles, and other words represents another important discourse-oriented technique invo- cabulary instruction when learners can learn phrases or groups of words as lexical chunks, instead of incremental constituent parts.
• To expand the range of verbal semantic networks, the traditional foci of vocabulary teaching, such as formal two- or three-word verbs and idioms, as well as derivational prefixes and suffixes can also prove to be highly profitable because they provide additional ven- ues for learning and expanding vocabulary.
STRATEGIES AND TACTICS FOR TEACHING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES
The following six exercises are designed to increase students' mastery of English verbs.
(1) Dictionary Exercise
To show learners how to use an English-English dictionary to their best advantage, a copy of a dictionary entry can be blown up to make it easier to notice details. An example of the entry for the verb occur can be reason-
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