Page 198 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

184 CHAPTER8
Although the basic ideas in this excerpt may not be difficult to under- stand, the student's repertoire appears to be severely limited. In a 122-word extract, the word change is repeated six times, development three times, and know twice. In this case, as in numerous other cases of L2 academic text, ru- dimentary vocabulary work can lead to a direct, even if superficial, improve- ment. For instance, both nouns and verbs can be somewhat more diverse (see chaps. 5, 7, and 12 on nouns, verb tenses, and hedges for additional in- formation):
• change (verb)—evolve—expand—develop—transform—modify—al- ter—advance
• produce (verb)—create—bring about
• know—be informed/trained/educated—be familiar with—be an expert
in—have experience in—work in
• increase (verb)—advance—gain (momentum)—grow—broaden—
spread—enhance—expand—rise—strengthen—boom (ifrapid)
Although few of these substitute expressions are lexically and syntacti- cally sophisticated, their uses in L2 academic prose can make a noticeable difference in the linguistic variety of textual features.
ACTIVITY ("DOING")VERBS
Activity verbs comprise the largest class of verbs, and some of the following verb classes actually refer to actions that are a subclass of activity verbs (e.g., see Reporting Verbs and Relationship Verbs herein). Activity verbs refer to voluntary (e.g., eat,give, take) and nonvoluntary (e.g.,precipitation falls, the river overflows) physical actions (Quirk et al., 1985). Two- and three-word verbs also belong in this class (e.g.,give up, look into, bring about). Because ac- tivity verbs are numerous in English, practically every ESL vocabulary and reading skills textbook incorporates at least some practice with these items.
Activity verbs can be transitive and intransitive (i.e., used with or without direct objects), and they can be used with animate subjects (e.g., thesociolo- gist adheres to ..., thewriter labors) or inanimate subjects (the valve turns,thecon- clusion sums up ...). Nation's (1990) analysis showed that among vocabulary
lists based on introductory university-level texts, activity verbs were not par- ticularly frequent (see the complete list ofverbs earlier in this chapter). Sim- ilarly, Biber's, et al. (1999) examinations of various English-language corpora found that in academic prose, activity verbs were far less common than existence verbs, although activity verbs predominate in conversations, fiction, and news reports.
For example, in Nation's (1990) list, activity verbs largely refer to physical actions, but not necessarily in their literal meanings:
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