Tham khảo tài liệu 'teaching academic esl writing part 20', ngoại ngữ, toefl - ielts - toeic phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 178 CHAPTER 8 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 university-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 concerned 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 terminology adopted in many ESL student textbooks. In addition because textbook classifications do not always examine verb types in sufficient detail 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 .