The Vibrant English Verb: Mastering Meaning and Usage draws upon Dr. Steven West's work with more than 5,000 ESL students in his linguistics and advanced grammar courses during the past fifteen years. It was created for teachers and advanced students of English as a Second Language. It demonstrates the vibrancy of English verbs in the ways that they interact with each other in a discourse. Dr. West's extensive knowledge of languages other than English has given him special understanding of the English Learner's dilemma. He has identified the most vexing problems students encounter when studying verbs and has provided detailed, easy-to-understand explanations along with pictorial timelines which clearly identify the relationships among the constituents of a sentence, a paragraph or a dialog. This book focuses on the 12 tenses of the indicative mood in English. Verbs in these 12 forms provide the linguistic foundation for the entire English language since verbs hold sway over all sentences. Most languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish, for example) have only limited forms of verb tenses. That's why the students from these languages have extreme difficulty with our verb system. Consider the following English sentence: "We would have been reading the book all day yesterday if the dog hadn't chewed up the pages." If this were to be translated into Chinese, the equivalent English version of that translation would be: "We no read book-." In order for Chinese English Learners to master the English version, they must understand the meaning and usage of auxiliary verbs ("would have been") along with the main verb as a present participle, ("reading"). They have no frame of reference from their own language to guide them toward this understanding. The difficulty for them is that Chinese has no auxiliary verbs; nor does its grammar include participles. This book also provides many sample dialogues which, sentence by sentence, verb by verb, help teachers and students refine their understanding of which verb tense to use under what circumstances and why. Dr. West's text is the perfect companion for teachers of ESL and for students who realize that although they may have passed many English proficiency tests, they are still stymied in their real-world use of English.
