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.

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.