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Language Teaching Research
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The acquisition of semantics-syntax correspondences and verb frequencies in ESL materials

Alan Juffs

University of Pittsburgh, juffs+{at}pitt.edu

This article provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in Interchange (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a second language (ESL). Current theoretical approaches to verb classes permit a fine-grained crosslinguistic description of differences in semantics-syntax correspondences for verbs; in this article, transitive verbs are split into five subcategories and intransitives are split into two categories. A corpus analysis of Interchange suggests that ESL materials may under-represent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty. These findings suggest that weak contrastive analysis and a more careful consideration of syntactic properties of verbs could be useful to teachers and materials writers.

Language Teaching Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, 93-123 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/136216889800200202
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