The profession of teaching has long been characterised by certain habitual convictions, which Spencer undertook to shake rudely, and even to deride. The first of these convictions is that all education, physical, intellectual, and moral, must be authoritative, and need take no account of the natural wishes, tendencies, and motives of the ignorant and undeveloped child. The second dominating conviction is that to teach means to tell, or show, children what they ought to see, believe, and utter. Expositions by the teacher and books are therefore the true means of education. The third and supreme conviction is that the method of education which produced the teacher himself and the contemporary or earlier scholars, authors, and publicists, must be the righteous and sufficient method. Its fruits demonstrate its soundness, and make it sacred. Herbert Spencer, in the essays included in the present volume, assaulted all three of these firm convictions. Accordingly, the ideas on education which he put forth more than fifty years ago have penetrated educational practice very slowly particularly in England; but they are now coming to prevail in most civilised countries, and they will prevail more and more. Through him, the thoughts on education of Comenius, Montaigne, Locke, Milton, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and other noted writers on this neglected subject are at last winning their way into practice, with the modifications or adaptations which the immense gains of the human race in knowledge and power since the nineteenth century opened have shown to be wise.

Charles W. Eliot.

1910

Partly considered as one category of collocations, support verb constructions (SVCs) are described as word combinations, containing a verb and a noun, where the nouns carry the whole meaning and the verbs act as a complement. Despite being very common in English, SCVs seem to be problematic for many L2 language learners. This book therefore attempts to respond to the needs of EFL learners having hard time matching the word combinations and it uses a contrastive corpus analysis methodology based on native and non-native corpora. Having been greatly inspired by Firth (1957) who contended that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”, I have also focused the emphasis on raising awareness of the EFL learners and teachers for the importance of the role of lexical co-occurrences in understanding word meaning. Hopefully, the prospective readers will appreciate this new perspective related to the combinative nature of English language.