The Verb Well: Book 1 (PDF)

"Introduction (p. i)

The design of this book The Verb Well three-book series offers a carefully crafted set of verb-vocabulary materials to cover 450 frequent and useful verbs, 150 verbs per book. Each book in the reproducible series presents thirty easy-to-learn clusters of five verbs each, with each cluster organized according to meaning. Some share a common activity or setting – e.g. ""Garden"": dig - harvest - plant - rake - water. Others are governed by a key concept – e.g. ""Competition"": compete - attack - fight - struggle - race. Either way, the organization has a thesaurus-like quality, in that the verbs always appear in a context created through inclusion of other related terms.

This organizational plan has two important advantages. First of all, it helps students experience success with the crucial vocabulary-learning strategy of consistently grouping new words to be learned around an easily recalled center of meaning. Such an approach facilitates visualization, verbal association, chaining, and other familiar memory-enhancement techniques that can definitely promote vocabulary learning. Secondly, the structure of the book is designed to underline the necessity of recognizing and mastering distinctions between words that may be generally similar in meaning but that cannot be substituted for each other.

Thus, for instance, the ""Etiquette"" group includes both insult and snub, and the ""Liquids"" group includes pour, spill, and sprinkle. Introducing this fairly simple but nonetheless eye-opening level of semantic subtlety helps overcome learners' common tendency to take a one-word-fits-all approach to vocabulary learning, that short-sighted expedient can lead to learning just very general expressions which are then overused and over-extended to the detriment of precision and flexibility.

The verbs presented in the Verb Well series were chosen for frequency and utility. Three major word-frequency lists were consulted: West's

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