Teaching the Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Dimensions of Verbs.

The audiolingual emphasis on teaching structure with a minimum of vocabulary has contributed little to the development of vocabulary materials. Lexical usage, however, is an area in which ESL students demonstrate a considerable number of errors. In an effort to help develop lexical competence, this paper illustrates one strategy for teaching vocabulary with the use of a computer corpus. Because of their inherent difficulty, verbs are the main focus of the materials, although the technique could be used with other parts of speech. It is assumed here that knowing a word involves knowing how to use the word syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically.