Teaching academic ESL writing part 13

SINGULAR AND PLURAL NOUNS WITH DIFFERENT MEANINGS Many essential countable nouns such as business, development, difficulty, fail-ure, industry, injustice, technology, and truth have diff

Irregular Plural Forms of Nouns Other highly common nouns from

the University Word List and Academic Word List that have irregular

plu-ral forms are: axis, crisis, criteria, emphasis, focus, hypothesis, index, matrix, me-dia/medium, overseas, parenthesis, pendulum, phenomenon, radius, series, species, strata, thesis.

All nouns that end in -is take the plural marker -es (crises, emphases, hypotheses, parentheses), -ex/ix endings become plural -ces (indices, matrices), -um nouns take -a (medium—media, stratum—strata), and -on endings have the plural form of -a (criterion—criteria, phenomenon—phenomena) Such nouns as overseas, series, and species have identical plural and singular forms (one series—several series, one species—many species).

These nouns are not likely to be frequent in conversations and daily spoken interactions For this reason, they probably cannot be learned in the course of routine communications and activities for developing conversa-tional fluency (see chap 1) This may be one of the reasons that the vocabulary of even advanced and proficient L2 students does not include them Although teachers may attempt to design activities and exercises to provide students practice with these nouns, it is doubtful that many

enjoyable tasks can be constructed with nouns such as axis, crisis, and hypothesis Nonetheless, it is essential for students to know the meaning,

pronunciation, and spelling of these nouns at least to recognize them when they appear in academic reading and lectures There are few better solutions to the dilemma of their learning beyond simple memorization and contextualized practice and use The key to success in students' vocabu-lary learning is the teacher's insistence that essential vocabuvocabu-lary nouns be used when they are needed

SINGULAR AND PLURAL NOUNS WITH DIFFERENT MEANINGS

Many essential countable nouns such as business, development, difficulty, fail-ure, industry, injustice, technology, and truth have different meanings in

singu-lar and plural forms When used in singusingu-lar they refer to concepts or whole notions, and when used in plural they refer to specific instances, types,

kinds, and occurrences of these notions The singular form technology refers

to all types of technology as a concept, but the plural technologies to various types/subsets of technology such as computer, automotive, or

telecommuni-cation For example,

The development of economy is the most important job of the government in my coun-try (From a student text.)

In this sentence, the noun development refers to the entire collective notion that consists of many components, such as the development of

agriculture, transportation, and commerce On the other hand, the plural form developments refers to events and occurrences:

Many developments in the political arena point to a possibility of early elections.

The plural form developments refers to small and separate events or

occasions In other words, when used in singular these nouns refer to overall constructs, and in plural to smaller instances/subdivisions of these constructs

The same principle of identifying meanings of singular and plural forms can apply to other nouns that may be considered noncount, but are employed in both plural and singular:

beer—beers, cake—cakes, change—changes, cheese—cheeses, chocolate—choco-lates, coffee-coffees, coke—cokes, hair—hairs, glass—glasses, milk—milks, pa-per—papers, tea—teas, time—times, wine—wines, work—works, youth—youths

All these refer to whole notions/concepts/mass quantities or one instance

of in singular and specific instances in plural:

Beautiful hair [as a total mass/collective] requires much care vs If you found two gray hairs [two instances/small occurrences of] onyourhead, do not panic We have

a solution to grays.

Most nouns that can have different meanings in singular or plural are usu-ally (and unfortunately) found in the lists of noncount nouns that are ubiqui-tous in ESL grammar texts To avoid confusion on the part of students, some researchers (DeCarrico, 2000, p 21) have called them "crossover" nouns; if this label is helpful to learners, there is little reason not to use it

GERUNDS AND ABSTRACT NOMINALIZATIONS

Analyses of written and academic English corpora have demonstrated that gerunds and abstract derived nouns are very common in academic and pro-fessional texts (Bhatia, 1993) According to Biber's et al (1999) findings, ab-stract nominalizations are encountered far more frequently in academic writing than in news reportage or fiction On the other hand, conversa-tional discourse has the lowest rates of nominalization occurrences among all other language genre Biber et al explained that "academic discourse is much more concerned with abstract concepts than the other registers, espe-cially conversation" (p 323)

Analysis of L2 text, however, shows that in academic texts advanced NNS writers employ significantly fewer gerunds and nominalizations than first-year NS students without formal training in writing (Hinkel,

2002a, 2003b) The outcome of the NNS shortfalls in the uses of these lexical features is that L2 academic text—both spoken and written—ap-pears to be far less academic than may be expected in college and univer-sity settings In addition, given their lack of academic vocabulary needed

to convey abstract concepts, L2 writers may simply be unable to explain their ideas and adequately demonstrate their familiarity with readings and material Therefore, using gerunds and abstract nominalizations can make students' texts appear less childish and simple and, ultimately, lead to better grades in mainstream courses Although teaching the uses

of gerunds and abstract nominalizations is not particularly exciting, these structures are essential for the development of students' academic language skills.

Both gerunds and nominalizations represent nouns and nounlike forms derived from other parts of speech Gerunds are always derived from verbs, but nominalizations can be derived from verbs, adjectives, and other nouns

(e.g., read—reading, learn—learning, develop—development, ship—shipment,

dark—darkness, warm—warmth) A gerund can be derived from practically

any verb by adding -ing to its base form (e.g., sing—singing, write—writing,

listen—listening, speak—speaking).

An important characteristic shared by nouns (including nominal-izations) and gerunds is that they frequently occur as objects/complements

of prepositions (e.g., a chance of obtaining funding/failure, a discussion about

learning/equipment, an opportunity for improving teenagers'diet/improvement) In

academic writing, the most common nouns that take of + gerund construc-tions are in declining order (Biber et al., 1999):

way idea problem experience form system

method possibility process purpose important

means effect cost advantage practice

Derived abstract nominalizations are more complex than gerunds because several various suffixes exist, all of which have the function of

converting words, including simple nouns, to abstract nouns: -age (acreage,

mileage), -ance/ence (assistance, dependence), -cy (accuracy, fluency), -ity (ability, simplicity), -ment (predicament, government), -ness (readiness, cleanliness), and -ion (solution, intrusion) Other nominalizers, such as -er/or (teacher, doctor), -ee (employee, interviewee), -ent/ant (attendant, student), are also common, but they

are relatively semantically simpler than abstract nouns because in most cases they refer to people or concrete objects that perform a particular

action or are from/in a particular place (senator, New Englander).

Although lists of these suffixes are found in most L2 reading and vocabu-lary books, in general terms it is not possible to predict what types of verbs,

adjectives, or nouns can be derived by the suffixes -ment, -ness, -ity, or -ure.

In academic writing, nouns with the suffix -ness refer to characteriza-tions and states, whereas -ion nouns are particularly prevalent in the

ac-ademic genre, where the suffix occurs in frequent and rare words.

The Most Common Nouns with -tion Derivations

action direction infection production

addition distribution information reaction

application education instruction relation

association equation ooperation situation

communication examination organization variation

concentration formation population

(Biberetal., 1999)

In terms of their semantic content, most gerunds and nominal-izations, which are frequent in generalnominal-izations, refer to concepts, ac-tions, and processes that would be difficult to convey by other lexical means For example,

lure have the most to gain by developing, teaching, and protecting the prevailing institu-tions and culture Culture normally justifies the instituinstitu-tions and structure, and institutions generally work to support the structure and culture Together, social structure,

culture, and institutions are important to what individuals do (Charon, 1999, p 125)

Gerunds, even more than nominalized nouns, refer to processes (some

linguists actually call them process nouns)—for example:

developing (ideas)—development

creating (software)—creation

observing (animals)—observation

suggesting (new directions)—suggestion

In fact, one of the key differences between gerunds and nominalized nouns is that of a process referred to by means of gerund versus an abstraction, concept, or action expressed in nominalizations Thus,

instituting something is different from an institution and organizing from an organization There are various derivations of both types that exist in only

one form (e.g., reading, writing, teaching, learning, hoping or culture, moisture,

revolution, possibility, probability}.

Traditionally, practically all L2 grammar books provide lists of verbs that

are followed by gerunds, infinitives, or both (e.g., enjoy + swimming (but not

to swim), decide + to go (but not going), or like to dance/dancing) Although

these lists are essential, in reality the uses of gerunds are a bit more complicated than this For example, the sentence

*Developing is expensive

is incorrect because develop is a transitive verb, which requires a direct

ob-ject Thus, the sentence

Developing software is expensive

is correct Because all gerunds are derived from verbs, the point of fact is that if gerunds are derived from transitive verbs, which require a direct ob-ject, the process nominals retain their transitivity feature.

A good explanation to give students can be a metaphor: When a verb goes to a new job and becomes a noun, it takes its possessions

with it; when a verb is converted to a nominal by means of adding -ing

to its basic form (suggest+ing), it drags the object with it (e.g.,

Sug-gesting a new plan requires preparation).

For a list of common transitive verbs, see chapter 3.

In addition, another level of complexity is added with gerund singular and plural distinctions when some gerunds can be used in plural and some cannot (e.g.,

reading—readings, swimming—*swimmings).

As a general rule, gerunds that refer to concrete objects and events can take plural, and other gerund forms that refer to processes cannot Therefore, gerunds that can be used in a plural form are far less common

than those that are noncount (e.g., beginnings, endings [of books/movies/stones],

markings, paintings [but not *clothings]).

COMPOUND NOUN PHRASES

Noun phrases consist of several nouns, among which the first noun or two function as adjectives to describe the main (head) noun:

composition class

university composition class

university-level composition class

In these phrases, the noun class is the head noun, and all other nouns describe the class.

Compound noun phrases are extraordinarily popular in academic texts, and some linguists call them "notorious" (Bhatia, 1993, p 148) These structures can come in various forms: Some consist of two simple nouns

(book cover, vocabulary list), gerund/nominalization and another noun

(listening activities, automobile production), and fused verb + particle constructions (setup, handout, wash-back effect) Corpus studies of academic

texts have found that these are far more common in written than conversational genres, that noun compounding represents a highly productive structure, and that formal written texts include more of these constructions than informal varieties (Biber et al., 1999)

In L2 texts, one of the typical errors is pluralization of the descriptive

nouns in the compounds (e.g., *a five-credits_-hours course, *a 20-years_-old student} Relatively speaking, avoiding these errors is easy to teach In Eng-lish, adjectives do not take plural, and the structures *blues books and *bigs blue books are incorrect because only the main (head) noun can be used in

plural Similarly, with compound nouns, the first job is to identify the main noun (usually the last one in the string of nouns) that can take the plural:

a five-credit-hour course(s), a 25-year-old woman (women)

(for an in-depth discussion of adjectives see chap 9)

In most compound noun phrases (e.g., the vegetable garden), only the

last (head) noun takes the plural marker -s, and other nouns that

de-scribe it do not

Exceptions to this rule are few, and they almost always include "exclusive plurals" (Quirk et al., 1985) when it is known that the descriptive noun

includes more than one entity (e.g., arts degree, customs officer; it is also possible to say art degree when one type of art is involved).

Another typical problem with compound nouns is that compounding can take place only if an adjective form of a particular noun does not exist:

vegetable soup, noodle dish, rice bowl, table top (there are no adjectives that can be derived from vegetable, noodle, rice, or table) In contrast, compound

structures such as

*nation flag, *economy data, *culture norms

are incorrect because adjectival forms of nouns have to be used if they

exist—national, economic, and cultural.

A word of caution is necessary when it comes to adjectives derived from nouns because the meaning of the adjectives can be quite different from that of the noun:

composition teacher vs compositional teacher

book vs bookish

territory vs territorial

CHAPTER SUMMARY

To deal with shortfalls in students' repertoire of nouns prevalent in aca-demic texts, a concerted effort has to be made to increase the learner's

vo-cabulary range To this end, several simple and effective teaching techniques can be highly productive:

• Contextualized lexical substitutions of nouns that are common and

frequently repeated in L2 prose do not require much work beyond

the teachers' use of a thesaurus (or even the vocabulary in their own

lexicon)

• Provide practice and exercises based on the list of highly common

nouns employed in academic textbooks across various disciplines

A reasonable number of words learned during a 10- to 12-week

course can range from 700 to 1,000, and the rate of instructed

learning can be as high as 10 words per hour (or more)

• Expanding students' academic vocabulary should start at the

begin-ning level of proficiency and continue throughout their language

training Astute text simplification may take the form of omitting

rare words, but not lexically and structurally complex common

aca-demic words, because learners can only benefit from maximized

ex-posure to frequent and, thus, essential academic words

Many specific problems that L2 writers encounter in producing aca-demic prose can be explicitly taught through simple explanations and exer-cises Research has shown that explicit instruction of any sort leads to significantly greater language gains than no instruction or implicit instruc-tional approaches (Norris & Ortega, 2000) The following teaching tech-niques have proved to be effective and easy to use:

• Count and noncount nouns that are usually classified based on

their semantic features are difficult to learn because L2 writers

re-quire substantial vocabulary range to understand the semantic clas-sifications Categorizing nouns based on their structural features,

such as endings, can be more productive In general, only 32

noncount nouns are frequent in academic texts

• Abstract plural and singular nouns may have different meanings in

singular and plural forms Most learners are not aware of this

dis-tinction, which should be addressed in teaching

• Gerunds and nominalized nouns are particularly important for

ac-ademically bound L2 learners because most cannot be acquired

through exposure to conversational discourse and fluency-building

activities Research has shown, however, that gerunds and

nominalized nouns are two to three times less common in L2 than

in LI academic prose

• Compound noun phrases are extraordinarily popular in academic

texts, but can be structurally complex A few simple techniques

deal-ing with these structures can help learners overcome some of the

problems associated with the uses of these constructions in L2 text

STRATEGIES AND TACTICS FOR TEACHING

AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES

Incidental learning of vocabulary (see chap 3 for a discussion) represents the least labor-intensive way to expand vocabulary The learning goals of the teaching suggestions and activities presented next are developed to promote:

• Noticing the uses and meanings of nouns (see chap 3)

• Incidental learning of words (see chap 3)

• Discussing contextualized occurrences of nouns and their lexical substitutions

It is crucial that the teacher follow up on the assigned exercises and vocabulary learning tasks As mentioned in chapter 3, learning 10 new words per hour is not an unreasonable rate, and it is through the discussion and activities that the words are actually learned In-class discussions and/or follow-up work with nouns and other words provide the most important benefit because they give students additional opportunities to:

• Focus their attention on specific vocabulary items

• Use them in speaking and listening

• Negotiate meaning of nouns and other words

• Refine contextualized meanings and syntactic properties of items

• Develop classroom interactional skills

All teaching activities exemplified in this chapter and others have been used for decades with many types of academically bound students with vari-ous levels of proficiency, from beginning to advanced Although books on teaching academic vocabulary often call for constructing exercises and tests for each lesson, these are laborious and time-consuming The teaching sug-gestions presented here are based on using texts easily obtainable from print and written media sources such as advertisements, book cover de-scriptions, and news reports In the days of the Internet and Web site prolif-eration, example texts can be easily obtained in many geographical locations and can be chosen to suite all types of learners—from beginners to highly advanced writers

As a general rule, if text simplification is needed, it is best to eliminate rare rather than common words, even if they are lexically and structurally complex

Prefixes and Suffixes—Dictionary Work and Practice

English-English dictionaries are alphabetically organized, and a photo-copy of one to three dictionary pages with words that begin with a specific prefix can allow learners to figure out its meaning For example:

• incommunicado—if you are kept incommunicado, you cannot see or talk to

anyone

• incomparable—so good or beautiful that nothing else can even be compared

to it

• incompatible—two people are incompatible if they have completely different

personalities and cannot get along

• incompetence—no ability or skill to do a job properly

• incompetent—not having an ability or skill to do a job properly

• incomplete—not having all its parts

• incomprehension—not being able to understand something

• inconclusive—not leading to a clear decision or result (Adapted from

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1995).

It is important for dictionary-based exercises to include dictionaries of appropriate levels of difficulty For example, learners' dictionaries can be used for beginners and intermediate-level students, and advanced learners can work with unsimplified dictionaries The work on a particular prefix/suffix needs to coincide with other practice with prefixes/suffixes

with similar meanings (e.g., ab-, un-, new-) and exercises found in all

vocabulary textbooks

While working on prefixes and their meanings, it may be useful to devote

at least some amount of attention to parts of speech and their varied

suffixations (e.g., noun suffixes -ion, -ure, -ment are different from adjective suffixes -i/able, -a/ent, -i've) Also the structure of dictionary entries and the

practical information contained in them can be examined and discussed (e.g., count/noncount designations, verb-transitive/verb-intransitive, or prepositions typically used with particular nouns)

Graded Exposure to Authentic Texts (Increasing Lexical Complexity)

(a) For beginning students, magazine/newspaper advertisements or book cover descriptions with frequent noun uses can be used to provide exposure

to contextualized vocabulary learning On a photocopy of the advertise-ment/description, the useful and practical nouns (verbs, adjectives, or prep-ositions) can be blocked out with adhesive labels or whiteout to create blanks for a fill-in-the-blank practice with authentic language However, the nouns from the original are listed below the text to be used as prompts for blank filling For example:

If you sometimes have problems and adapting to American culture, or have difficulty communicating with of American English, this book will help you.

Each chapter in this book has two (1) readings and exercises about cross-cultural and selected areas of American ,• and (2) intercultural communication designed to promote discussion ofcross-cul-tural communication To help you better understand the material, the book includes

• reading ,

• comprehension questions,

• discussion questions,

• exercises, and

• conversational

Omitted nouns and gerunds:

sections activities exercies culture understanding speakers communication vocabulary activities

(Adapted from Levine & Adelman, 1993.)

Vocabulary expansion practice:

sections—parts, portions

understanding—comprehending

activities—exercises, work, practice, doing something

conversation—speaking, talking, discussing

(b) An activity such as described in (a) can be used without the list of original nouns (or other types of words) when students are expected to come up with lexical alternatives or various possibilities for appropriate context completion For instance, all appropriate lexical replacement options can be acceptable if students supply them

In intermediate-level classes, newspaper articles on various topics of interest, as well as science and market reports, can become a good means to increase the level of text complexity and lexical variety (see later example)

If the original nouns/words are not provided, students can work in groups to complete the text and supply as many contextually appropriate fillers as they can Groups can compete for finding as many lexically appropriate and syntactically correct fillers, and the winner of each blank can be awarded a token (e.g., a piece of colored paper) The group that accumulates the most tokens wins the competition Students usually enjoy this type of competition, and the amount of discussion associated with appropriate lexical and syntactic choices of words can be highly productive