Rationale
Nominalization is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon that is commonly seen in academic discourses As one type of academic discourse, English research article is characterized by its reliance on nominalized structures Undeniably, formality and encapsulation are two principal features of academic writing discourse These ones could be achieved with the use of nominalization The frequent use of nominalization renders greater degree of texts‟ formality and objectiveness Both Halliday (1994/2000) and Ure (1997) think that nominalization is closely related to text formality As Halliday (1994) points out that “the nominal group is the primary resource use by the grammar for packing in lexical items at high density” (Halliday, 1994:351) Ure (1997) also holds the viewpoint that lexical density might be a norm used for measuring degree of text formality She maintains that the higher the lexical density of a text is, the more formal the text appears Therefore, nominalization could be seen as an indicator of text formality In addition, nominalization plays an important role of encapsulation (Thompson, 2000) Understanding the nature and characteristics as well as the roles of nominalization in English academic discourse would make great contribution to the perception of this discourse genre, which are necessary for academic writers Thus, it is of great necessity to conduct a study on the phenomenon of nominalization in academic discourses if we want to learn more about this important variety of English and benefit the reading and writing of English academic discourses, especially research articles In this thesis, the writer attempts to explore how nominalization is realized in English articles with the hope that it will help readers recognize the importance of nominalization for the comprehension and this genre.
Aims of the study
In this study, the writer aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in five English research articles of the journal Educational Studies More specifically, the author will classify nominalizations in the articles, and give a description of their characteristics and functions based on Halliday‟s systemic functional approach
In brief, the study would seek to answer the following questions:
1 How is nominalization realized in the articles of Educational Studies?
2 What are the possible effects of nominalization in academic discourse?
Scope of the study
The research‟s focus is to investigate the realization of nominalization in the light of systemic functional grammar in the corpus of English research articles extracted from two latest volumes of the journal Educational Studies.
Significance of the study
The author hopes that this paper will yield some insights into nominalization in academic discourse, especially in research articles Additionally, the study might offer some suggestions for teaching academic writing and translating academic discourses
An academic writing would be more formal and concise with the high frequency of nominalization occurring in the writing Finally, with the results of this study, readers can find common types of nominalization appearing in articles as well as their effects, which might be useful for those who write research articles.
Design of the study
Following is the construction of the study
Chapter 1 – Theoretical background: provides the background of the study, including definition of key concepts, theories, and review of related studies
Chapter 2 – Methodology: describes the corpus compilation and data collection procedure Data analyzing methods and instruments and analytical framework are also clearly presented in this chapter
Chapter 3 – Findings and Discussion: presents, analyzes and discusses the findings that the researcher found out in order to answer the research questions.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Nominalization
Linguists might have different definitions of nominalization In Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Bussmann, 1996), broadly speaking, nominalization refers to every derivation of nouns from another word class Narrowly speaking, nominalization refers to productive process of word formation through which words of all word classes can be used as nouns (Bussmann, 1996: 804) In Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002), nominalization is defined as the grammatical process of forming nouns from other parts of speech, usually verb or adjective (Richards and Schmidt, 2002: 395)
Aarts (1982) defines the nominalization as a process of turning a non-nominal element into a noun group It has two aspects of sense in definition (Aarts, 1982):
1) In a narrow sense, nominalization refers to the nouns derived from verbs or adjectives including gerund, or the finite clause turning into a nominalization For example: They rejected my complain → their rejection of my complaint
2) In a broad sense, nominalization refers to all the elements that can act as noun or noun group It includes nominal clauses, infinitives, gerunds, etc for example (nominalization in italics):
- Everyone could see that he did not want to commit himself on the controversy
- That the driver could not control his car was obvious
- The stranger offered to show me the way
Quirk et al (1985) and Aarts (1982) refer to a narrow sense of nominalization It only involves the change of form and grammatical categories Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics and Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics focus on the derivation of the words, but these two definitions have a wider and unclear range All these definitions are all concerned about the changes of the lexical elements but the function and structures of nominalization in a clause
For some linguists, nominalization broadly refers to “grammatical processes by which a verb, a verb phrase, a sentence, or a portion of a sentence including the verb can function as a noun phrase” (Li and Thompson, 1982:575)
According to Halliday (1985), nominalization refers to any element of group that can function as nouns or noun groups in a clause, including clauses, nominalized adjectives or verbs, etc Nominalization “is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor” (Halliday 2004b:656) Through nominalization, processes (linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, in general, as adjectives) are re-construed metaphorically as nouns, enabling an informationally dense discourse
There are different ways of classifying nominalization Some of them are mentioned as follows:
Langacker (1991) argues that nominalization types differ according to the level of organization at which the nominalization takes place Three types of nominalizations can be distinguished as: nominalizations at the level of the word (e.g teacher), nominalizations which nominalize a structure that lies in between a verb and a full clause (Sam's washing the windows) and, finally, nominalizations consisting of full clauses (e.g that Sam washed the windows)
In Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991), three types of nominalization are proposed:
Action nominalization nominalizes a verb with no accompanying arguments
(actants), creating a new lexical item which designates a generic type of action or event
Factive nominalization nominalizes a verb along with all of its actants except the subject, these are also called “participles” or “gerunds” This creates an instance of an event not uniquely identified or “located in conceptual space”
Sentential nominalization nominalizes a verb along with all of its actants including the subject This creates an instance of an event distinguished from all others located for the listener in conceptual space
According to Chomsky (1970), among the various types of nominal expressions in English, there are two types of particular importance including gerundive nominalization and derived nominalization For example, corresponding to the sentence “John has refused the offer.” we have the gerundive nominal of “John‟s refusing the offer” and the derived nominal of “John‟s refusal of the offer”
According to Comrie & Thompson (2007), nominalization is divided into two main types: lexical nominalization and clausal nominalization
1) Lexical nominalization is a derivational process that creates nouns from lexical verbs and adjectives, and the resulting nouns become the head nouns in a noun phrase (Comrie & Thompson, 2007) Derivational nominalization: According to Biber et al (2002), derivational nominalizations are ones derived from verbs and adjectives Most derived nouns are abstract in meaning This type of nominalization is formed by adding suffixes to the roots Nominalizing suffixes in English are listed below; the symbols V and A in the list show whether the noun is derived from a verb or an adjective respectively
-age (various meanings) baggage, wastage, postage, orphanage -al action or instance of V-ing arrival, burial, denial, proposal -an, -ian nationality, language, etc American, historian, Korean,
Victorian -ance, -ence action or state of V-ing, state of being A assistance, resemblance, experience, dependence, difference, ignorance -ant, -ent a person who V-s, something used for V-ing assistant, consultant, student, coolant, intoxicant, lubricant -cy state or quality of being A/N accuracy, adequacy, infancy, lunacy -dom state of being A/N boredom, freedom, stardom, wisdom -ee a person (various meanings) absentee, devotee, employed, trainee -er, -or a person/thing that V-s, actor, driver, filler, teacher, visitor, footballer, cottager, New Yorker -ery, -ry (various non-personal meanings) bakery, bravery, refinery, robbery
-ese nationality or language Chinese, Japanese, journalese -ess a female N actress, baroness, tigress, waitress -ette a small N cigarette, kitchenette, novelette -ful amount that fills a N handful, mouthful, spoonful -hood state of being A/N childhood, falsehood, likelihood -ician person concerned with N clinician, mathematician, physician -ie, -y a pet name for N auntie, daddy, doggie, Johnny
-ing action/instance of V-ing, place or material feeling, meeting, reading, training, building, crossing, landing, lining -ism ideology, movement, tendency atheism, criticism, capitalism, Marxism
-ist follower of N/A-ism, specialist atheist, capitalist, racist, physicist
-ite citizen or follower of N Moabite, Muscovite, Thatcherite -ity state or quality of being A ability, activity, density, insanity
-let a small N bomblet, booklet, leaflet, piglet
-ment action or instance of V-ing argument, movement, statement, treatment -ness state or quality of being A blindness, darkness, fairness, happiness -ship state or skill of being a N friendship, membership, relationship -tion action or instance of V-ing communication, education, production -ure action or instance of V-ing closure, departure, exposure, pressure (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:90)
De-verbal nominalization can be: the agent of the verb (the nouns with suffixed: -ant, - er, -or, -ar), the patient of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -ee); the process and result of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -age, -al, -ance, -tion, -ment), or the instrument of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -age, -ant) De-adjectival nominalizations refer to: abstract concepts having the quality described by the adjectives (the nouns with suffixes: -ity, -ness, -ism), or person having the quality described by the adjectives (the nouns with suffixes: -ist)
Another way to derive nouns from other word classes is known as conversion (or „zero derivation‟) (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:91) In this type, no affix is added to the base/ root, but the base itself is converted into a different word class, usually from a verb or adjective into a noun For example:
Base Meaning(s) of converted noun
Related studies
There have several been several studies on nominalization in some specific discourses such as medical, scientific and political discourses In the study “Nominalization as a rhetorical device of academic discourse”, Su (2011) investigated how lexical nominalization is used in the abstract sections of medical journal The data of the research was taken from 96 abstracts extracted from two journals: New England Journal of Medicine and BioMed Central Medicine Also in terms of nominalization in medical discourse, Wenyan (2011) did the research “Nominalization in medical papers:
A comparative study” With a corpus of discussion sections of 10 authentic medical papers by native English writers and 10 by Chinese academic writers drawn from very influential medical journals, the author carried out a formal comparative analysis of three aspects: frequency of nominalization, lexical density The study “Nominalization in scientific discourse: A corpus-based study of abstracts and research articles” of Holtz (2009) focused on the quantitative analysis of instances of nominalization in a corpus of research articles Emphasis was given to the discussion of the use of nominalization in abstracts and research articles, across corpora and domains The results indicate that nominalization occurs much more often in abstracts than in research articles, and that the difference in this occurrence is statistically significant
Moreover, abstracts generally show a much wider vocabulary range concerning the use of nominalization than their research articles With regard to nominalization in political discourse, Sarnackaite (2011) carried out the research “Nominalization as a cohesive device in political discourse” The author examined sixteen speeches of the politicians drawn from 100 tops speeches of American rhetoric The conclusion that is drawn from the study is that nominalization is the important part of political language that allows the politicians to categorize, label and describe phenomena efficiently and, whereby, contributes to the cohesion of their speeches by linking the text elements into a plausible unity Besides, the examples under analysis show that the common use of nominalization not only makes the discourse more precise and objective but also achieves fluency of the text
In spite of the fact that there have been many studies on nominalization in different kinds of discourse mentioned above, very few studies on nominalization in academic articles have been conducted Furthermore, none of them takes data from articles of the journal Educational Studies Therefore, the researcher hopes that this research could provide an in-depth analysis of nominalization in this writing genre.
METHODOLOGY
Corpus compilation
The corpus used in this study contains five English research articles extracted from two volumes 39 and 40 of the journal Educational Studies with the total length of around 20,000 words The reason for choosing the number of five articles is that data taken from this corpus would be adequate for both quantitative and qualitative analysis
Besides, this corpus is suitable for a minor thesis like this study With regards to Educational Studies, it is a journal consisting of research articles about the disciplines of social and educational foundations All the articles chosen for the corpus data are organized with the parts of introduction, method, results and discussion To facilitate the analysis process, the five articles are coded as I, II, III, IV, and V When taken as examples in the thesis, the sentences are coded with two parts as follows: A_x, of which A represents the article and x represents the line in that article For example:
I_60 means that the example is taken from the article I, line 60 Besides, examples existing in more than two lines would be coded as A_x-y (x and y both represent the lines) For example: II_15-18 implies that the example is extracted from the article II, from line 15 to 18.
Data collection procedure
The procedure of data collection could be put into steps as follows Firstly, the researcher identified nominalizations in the chosen articles For convenience of analyzing semantic roles of nominalization, just nominalizations functioning as head nouns in the nominal groups are selected Next, these nominalizations were categorized according to the analytical framework Then, the nominalizations were analyzed in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions to identify their semantic roles
2.2.1 Data analyzing instruments and methods
Content analysis is employed as the data analyzing instrument The analyzed data are then interpreted both quantitatively and qualitatively For quantitative analysis, after identifying the nominalization in the corpus data, the author counted the occurrence of nominalization and calculated their frequency in each article These statistics were presented in the form of table to show the general trend of nominalization usage between the five articles Then, the distribution of types of nominalization was examined in percentage and illustrated by the table The following is the exploration of the semantic roles of nominalization realized in the five texts seen from the point of view of metafunctions The statistics related to nominalization‟s semantic roles were illustrated by tables and graphs For qualitative analysis, the statistics taken from the data would be interpreted to find out the characteristics as well as the effects of nominalization used in the educational articles Each case of nominalization is closely analyzed using the analytical framework
In this study, the analytical framework is the combination of framework of Biber, Conrad and Leech (2002) and systemic functional grammar of Halliday (1994)
Nominalizations identified in the articles are classified according to Biber Conrad and Leech‟s way of categorizing (2002) as the framework in the table 1 below:
-al: arrival, -ance: assistance, -ence: difference, -ant: assistant,
-ent: student, -ee: trainee, -er: driver, -or: visitor, -ing: feeling, -ment: argument, -tion: education, -ure: closure
DA -cy: accuracy, -dom: freedom, -hood: childhood
-ee: absentee, -ist: racist, -ity: ability, -ness: richness
CV walk (v) – walk (n) catch (v) – catch (n)
The truth is that we don't know exactly how the disease is spread
Most experts agree that drugs like heroin can cause permanent brain damage
WH What he did was surprising
We have no knowledge of where it came from
I‟m just trying to get away early
A fourth challenge is to develop management arrangement within hospital
VING He began paging through old newspapers
My uncle‟s hobby is collecting fish
The next framework presents a sample of analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme according to the systemic functional grammar of Halliday (1994)
Figure 6: Analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Realization of nominalization in the five articles of Educational Studies …
The frequency of nominalization is obtained through the ratio between the total number of nominalization and the total number of words in each text A frequency of 1/14, for example, means that nominalization occurs on average once every 14 words of the text
To code the five chosen articles, each of them is assigned a number from I to V The summary of frequency of nominalization is presented in Table 2 below
It could be seen from the Table 2 that the frequency of nominalization in the three first articles is a slightly higher than the rest In the articles I, II and III, nominalization occurs approximately once every 13 or 14 words, while occurring once every 12 and
18 words in the articles IV and V respectively The articles I, II and III contain fewer words in comparison with the IV and V, but have higher frequency of nominalization, which implies that the more nominalization is used, the more succinct the text becomes Although all the five articles have different frequency of nominalization, the disparity among them is not great Thus, it could be concluded that the phenomenon of nominalization is prevail in academic discourse like research articles, and is considered one of the prominent characteristics for this type of discourse
To find out the distribution of types of nominalization in the data corpus, the author categorizes nominalization according to the classification mentioned in the previous section Details of all types of nominalization existed in the five texts are presented in the Appendix 3 Below is the chart showing the distribution of types of nominalization with specific statistics
Figure 7: Distribution of nominalization subtypes
DV DA CV THAT WH VING TO
As can be seen from the Figure 7, there exist all types of nominalization in all five articles It is clear that lexical nominalization comprising DV, DA and CV has higher ratio compared with clausal nominalization consisting of THAT, WH, VING and TO
Of four types of clausal nominalization, THAT and TO are the ones making up higher percentage in comparison with the rest WH and VING As regards lexical nominalization, the general trend of all the texts is using the large number of DV in which DV used in the articles II and III accounts for the highest proportion: 44.2% and 44.9 % respectively Ranking second is CV with fairly high percentage which is nearly equal to the percentage of DV Compared to DV and CV, the quantity of DA employed in these articles is comparatively small, particularly with just 2.7% in the article I and 2.9% in the article II In conclusion, most of nominalizations are derived from verbs, because by turning processes into nouns making clauses as heads, the speaker could convey entities and typically assume the existence of such entities These nominalizations could become participants or circumstances of other processes
3.1.3 Nominalization in terms of ideational metafunction
Different roles of nominalization in a clause would reveal different functions for the text Roles of nominalization realized in the five articles in terms of ideational metafunction was investigated and summarized in the table 3 below:
Table 3: Ideational realization of nominalization
It is notably seen from the table, in terms of ideational metafunction, nominalizations mostly play the role of circumstance (34.7% in the I, 44.55% in the II, 23.5% in the III, 31.6% in the IV and 24.1% in the V)
In many sentences of these research articles, it could be found that the frequency of circumstances is fairly high For example:
“Beliefs are based on prior experiences and influence subsequent interactions circumstance circumstance through what are known as schemas” (II_103-104) circumstance Eg2:
“Siegel’s work has shown that “resilience can be learned through experience”, circumstance and he picks out the key features of mindfulness strategies – approaching rather than avoiding difficult states, replacing rumination with observation based on circumstance curiosity and kindness , and the reflection on thoughts and feelings using notation and labelling.” (IV_83-89)
According to Halliday (1994), circumstance serves as an expansion of something else
In the examples above, the frequent use of circumstances makes the clauses lengthier and creates cohesion This is also prominent characteristic of academic discourse, which explains why understanding academic discourses seem to be quite challenging to almost all of the readers
3.1.4 Nominalization in terms of interpersonal metafunction
Figure 8: Interpersonal realization of nominalization
In terms of interpersonal metafunction, nominalizations appear as Subject, Complement or Adjunct of the process It is clearly seen from the Figure 8 that the majority of nominalizations are realized as complement Particularly, nominalizations functioning as complement make up more than 50% in each article III and V and nearly 50% in the article II and IV Ranking second is adjunct with 34.7%, 40.5%, 23.9%, 30.1% and 24.4% in the article I, II, III, IV and V respectively Accounting for the smallest proportion is nominalization playing the role of subject with around 20% of the total
A complement is an element within the Residue that has the potential of being subject; in other words, it is an element that has the potential for being given the interpersonally elevated status of modal responsibility – something that can be the nub of the argument It is typically realized by a nominal group For example:
At the heart of stereotyping is a process of mental categorisation
MOOD Subject Finite Predicator Complement
In the example above, the nominalization “categorisation” functioning as complement in the clause has the potential of being subject like:
Eg4: “A process of mental categorisation is at the heart of stereotyping”
When this nominalization plays the role of subject as in the example Eg4, the expression of Eg4 becomes very normal with the usual sentence structure Nonetheless, in the original version Eg3, inversion is used to make the nominalization
“categorisation” turn into complement and then the emphasis is on the prepositional phrase “at the heart of stereotyping” This creates uniqueness as well as formality for the utterance
3.1.5 Nominalization in terms of textual metafunction
Figure 9: Textual realization of nominalization
As could be seen from the Figure 9, most nominalizations existing in all five articles are realized in the position of rheme with the percentage ranging from 73.6% to 82.9%
Nominalizations in the position of theme just account for a small proportion, around one forth compared with rheme Theme is the starting point for the message of the clause and realized by whatever element comes first Rheme is the rest of the clause which provides the additional information added to the starting point and which is available for subsequent development in the text (Halliday, 1994) Rheme often carries new information that needs to be judged by readers By using nominalization in rheme,
Theme Rheme the new information becomes something abstract and non-negotiable, which helps create preciseness for the research articles
It is commonly found that the relations between theme and rheme might create cohesion in some cases The coherent text could be seen from how the information in the clauses goes on, that is the progression from theme to rheme in a clause This progression, according to Eggins (1994) is called thematic progression Danes (1974) and Eggins (1994) divide thematic progression into three patterns: simple linear progression, constant continuous theme, and theme progression with derived themes
The following are models of these patterns:
(3) Theme progression with derived themes
Possible effects of nominalization
Using nominalization instead of processes makes the processes disappear and the actors of the processes become invisible For example:
Eg10a: “If there is a natural tendency to think that Spinoza’s identification of
48 emotions was, perhaps, rather overambitious, Goleman (1996) brings us back to earth with a more economical taxonomy.” (IV_418-420)
Without using nominalization “tendency”, the above sentence might be paraphrased as follows:
Eg10b: If we tend to think that Spinoza identifies 48 emotions which was perhaps rather overambitious, Goleman (1996) brings us back to earth with a more economical taxonomy
Rather than use the process “tend” as a congruent form, the writer of the article IV metaphorically word as “tendency” to make the meaning of “tendency” now become a kind of abstract thing Additionally, the subject “we” in the congruent expression is omitted in the metaphorical expression; therefore, the focus is transferred to the
“tendency” itself Owing to obscuring subject, the utterance could achieve the sense of objectivity which is one of prominent feature of academic writing Another example from the article V also proves this effect of nominalization:
Eg11a: “Furthermore, it is a mandatory expectation that all Scottish teachers will have developed a set of “positive behaviour strategies” before they can register to teach with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (V_35-38)
This example might be reworded as:
Eg11b: Furthermore, Scottish government mandatorily expects that all Scottish teachers will have developed a set of “positive behaviour strategies” before they can register to teach with the General Teaching Council for Scotland
In the Eg11b, the appearance of the process “expects” entails the involvement of human agent “Scottish government” Consequently, the sense of objectivity in this sentence is not assured On the contrary, in the original version Eg11a, the subject
“Scottish government” is obscured; therefore, the emphasis is placed on
“expectation”, which creates the objectivity for the utterance
Not only does nominalization make the discourse objective but it also helps pack lexical items at high density The following example might be an illustration of this effect of nominalization
Eg12a: “Teachers with a humanistic orientation have an accepting, trusting view of students, and have confidence in students’ ability to be self-disciplining and responsible.” (II_164-165)
The example above contains two processes: “have an accepting, trusting view of students” and “have confidence in … responsible” By using nominalization:
“confidence” and “ability” functioning as Thing, all the information could be condensed in a complex clause If these nominalizations are replaced with adjectives having function as Attribute, there will be two another processes added to that complex sentence as follows:
Eg12b: Teachers with a humanistic orientation have an accepting, trusting view of students, and they are confident that students are able to be self-disciplining and responsible
Two nouns “confidence” and “ability” in the Eg12a are congruently reworded as adjectives “confident” and “able” in the Eg12b In this case, the utterance is realized by several clauses rather than just one complex sentence like the Eg12a This causes the text to lack the density and formality Thus, it could be said that nominalized process plays an important role that helps enhance the sense of conciseness for this academic writing
Besides, using nominalization is a useful way to create formality which is another notable feature of academic discourse This is clearly shown in the following example:
Eg13a: “They give me an angry look.” (II_240) Eg13b: They look me angrily
While the example Eg13b uses the process expressed by a verb “look”, the example
Eg13a metaphorically rewords this process as a noun functioning as Thing in the nominal group “an angry look” It is nominalizing metaphor “look” that makes the utterance much more formal compared with the congruent expression in the Eg13b
Another example that also proves this effect of nominalization is:
Eg14a: “This is the essence of a resilient affective style.” (IV_102-103) This example could be paraphrased using the adjective “essential” as:
Eg14b: This is essential for a resilient affective style
Clearly, the expression of the Eg14b is informal with using the congruent expression
“essential” Whereas, using nominalization “essence” in the Eg14a helps enhance formality for the discourse
Similarly, the following example shows the marked effect of nominalization
Eg15a: “… simple rules, rewards and sanctions can help pupils to improve their behaviour by taking responsibility for it.” (V_213-215)
Eg15b: … simple rules, rewards and sanctions can help pupils to improve their behaviour by being responsible for it
When congruently worded as “being responsible” in Eg15b, the sentence becomes less formal than Eg15a using the metaphorical expression “taking responsibility” In general, using nominalization could ensure the sense of formality for the academic utterance
Nominalization could be used as a cohesive device in the texts In the corpus under investigation, some nominalizations occurring in the title of the articles are repeated through the texts such as: “perception” (12 times in I), “control” (30 times in II),
“response” (15), “explanation” (19 times in III), “education” (15 times in IV),
“mindfulness” (16 times in IV), “discipline” (27 times in V) In this case, nominalization creates general cohesion for the text, that is, it not only establishes a connection between two sentences but also contributes to the unity of the whole articles All things considered, nominalization fits into the textual function that makes the academic articles construct as a coherent entity (Thompson, 2004).
Summary
In this chapter, answers to the research questions have been provided via a thorough analysis and discussion of the collected data
It could be concluded that nominalization is prevalent in English academic discourses with the frequent occurrence of about once every 13, 14, 18, 21 words in the articles
Besides, a large number of nominalizations are realized as circumstance, complement and rheme in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions respectively
Regarding the possible effects of nominalization in academic discourse, nominalization could create objectivity, conciseness, formality and cohesion for the texts
In this chapter, a summary of findings together with pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for further studies would be put forward.
Recapitulation
It is undeniable that nominalization plays an important role in constructing features for academic discourses The frequency of nominalization in the research articles is fairly high It occurs once every 13, 14, 18, 21 words in the corpus of articles With regard to typical types of nominalization in academic discourse, lexical nominalization is employed much more than clausal nominalization DV is the type accounting for the highest of three types of lexical nominalization As for clausal nominalization, there is a tendency to use THAT and TO more than WH and VING In terms of ideational metafunction, a large number of nominalizations are realized as circumstance
Concerning interpersonal metafunction, the majority of nominalizations have function as complement in the clause In addition, vast quantities of nominalizations are realized in the position of rheme
It is nominalization that brings some possible effects to the academic discourses
Firstly, objectivity of the articles could be achieved because the actors or participants would be invisible thanks to nominalization Furthermore, nominalization makes a contribution in enhancing the sense of conciseness for the academic writing since it helps pack lexical items at high density Lastly, nominalization plays a vital role in making the sense of formality for academic discourses.
Implications for teaching and translating English academic writing
It could be said that the phenomenon of nominalization is a prominent feature in academic discourses Hence, it is really important that teachers need to take this phenomenon into consideration when teaching academic writing Nevertheless, the descriptive analysis of the grammatical feature of nominalization is not adequate to develop students‟ awareness of using this feature in their writing Teaching the nominalized structure and developing students‟ skills of using this feature in their writing are essential Knowledge of nominalization proves effective in helping students develop their arguments in writing tasks In addition, nominalization benefits students in different ways in academic writing and tests by providing a means of building up the objectivity, conciseness, formality and cohesiveness in written texts Overall, teaching nominalization should receive greater attention in English teaching curriculum
It could be seen from the study that the more nominalizations exist in the text, the more complicated and ambiguous the text becomes Hence translating academic discourses might cause difficulties for many translators An insight into the nature of nominalization in academic discourse would certainly help translators solve problems that may occur when translating an academic discourse into the target language
Additionally, translator should be aware of making use of nominalization when translating an academic text to achieve the objectivity, conciseness, formality in the translated versions.
Limitations and suggestions for further studies
It is unavoidable that there exist some limitations of the research due to the limited scope, the time constraint and other objective factors
First of all, this study just focuses on exploring nominalization in the corpus of English academic discourses but do not draw comparisons with Vietnamese ones Thus, next studies might investigate the similarities as well as differences between English and Vietnamese research articles This could make students focus more attention on distinctive features of this genre when practicing academic writing
Secondly, in this study, the data corpus is restricted to five articles due to limited time
Thus, further studies should enrich the data with larger corpus to make the research more reliable
Furthermore, later studies could be conducted on using nominalization of students to investigate their awareness and knowledge of this grammatical phenomenon
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Studies in Literature and Language Vol 4 Canada: CSCanada 86-93
RESEARCH ARTICLES OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES
Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of middle school students
Kevin J O‟Connor a * and Christina M D‟Angelo b
This report shares a study that explored the perceptions pre-service teachers have of middle school students Participants were asked to complete the Adjective Checklist (ACL) by endorsing the words they considered most characteristic of a typical middle school student Items most frequently endorsed indicated a predominantly negative perception (e.g “awkward”, “confused” and “emotional”) Implications for pre- service teacher training are discussed
In the USA, as in many countries, young adolescents attend middle school which occupies the educational space between the elementary and the secondary high school years (typically grades 6–8, ages 11–14) The merits of making middle school distinct from the elementary and high school arrangements are well established and grounded in a philosophy of how best to provide for young adolescent learners (Association for Middle Level Education 2010)
Unfortunately, when groups are made distinct they are often assigned characteristics by which they come to be collectively perceived and stereotyped
Such is the case for middle school students who are widely believed to be physically and socially awkward, cognitively immature and emotionally full of youthful strife These stereotypes in combination with related perceptions of the middle school student being an “uncivilised beast” or a “disembodied hormonal surge” (Finders 1998/1999, 256) make it difficult to recognise the population‟s truer nature – a group full of diverse characteristics and ways of being
The public image problem middle school students have has not gone unnoticed by those interested in the education of early adolescents The Association for
Middle Level Education (2010) advocates that pre-service teachers should be given opportunities during their training to develop a positive disposition toward
59 the middle school student Inherent in this position is the notion that pre-service teachers are no different than others in their stereotyping of the population
Surprisingly, only a few studies have measured this These works, however, do confirm that pre-service teachers hold stereotypic notions and negative attitudes toward middle school students and have a related low perception of the occupational status of teaching in the middle school setting (Finders 1998/1999;
Prado et al 2007; Sage 1990; Stahler 1995)
In this report, we share a study that revisited the subject of pre-service teachers and their perceptions of middle school students Our intent was to offer a more current finding on the topic given the distance of prior works
Specifically, we designed the study to identify the character traits that comprise the image of a middle school student as held by pre-service teachers
Fifty-six traditional age (M = 20.12, SD = 1.22) undergraduate students (45 women, 11 men) enroled in an education programme (37 elementary/special education, 16 secondary education and 3 music education) at a private college in the north-east of the USA participated in this study Participants were predominantly Caucasian (52, 92.9%) and reported limited experiences with middle school aged early adolescents (32% had experience; of these 21% had a field-based training experience in the middle school setting)
Following research consent protocols participants were asked to complete the Adjective Checklist (ACL; Gough and Heilbrun 1983) The ACL is designed as a self-report measure of personality but it is often used by researchers interested in measuring stereotypes It is comprised of 300 alphabetically arranged adjectives
(traits) For stereotype research, individuals complete the measure in checklist fashion by marking the words they believe to be most descriptive of a particular target population For this study, participants were instructed to read through the list of adjectives and check those they considered characteristic of a typical middle school student
Descriptive statistics were used to analyse overall responses on the ACL to
76 middle school student as held by pre-service teachers? The top 25 adjectives based on highest frequency of endorsement were delineated (see Table 1)
At the heart of stereotyping is a process of mental categorisation A group is defined by a set of features which make it unique and distinguishable from others
When one comes in contact (direct or indirect) with an individual who holds membership in this group, the associated features that make up the cognitive category are assigned Top responses on the ACL with participants endorsing the words they believed to be most descriptive of a typical middle school student were overwhelmingly negative (e.g “awkward” and “immature”) This suggests that the attributes pre-service teachers maintain in their stereotype of a middle school student are largely undesirable These results are congruent with earlier studies done in this area (Finders 1998/1999; Prado et al 2007; Sage 1990; Stahler 1995) indicating pre-service teachers‟ negative and stereotypic perceptions of the population have been maintained
Table 1 Top 25 adjectives selected to describe a typical middle school student (N
These findings, while limited, have implications on pre-service teacher
94 training programmes There is a need for experiences that allow pre-service teachers to explore their perceptions and challenge the content of stereotyped beliefs about middle school students Descriptions of early adolescents provided in teacher education courses should focus on the full measure of characteristics exhibited by middle school students and move beyond highlighting of more stereotypic attributes (e.g Finders 1998/1999) In addition, field experiences that bring pre-service teachers in meaningful and positive contact with middle school students can help reduce reliance on stereotype content (e.g Prado et al 2007)
This study of perceptions was based on in the idea that the perceptions and if corresponding beliefs a group of people has regarding another are important This is particularly so those beliefs are based on stereotypes As stereotypic perceptions may contribute to how pre-service teachers approach the idea of middle school teaching and young adolescents in general, research on strategies aimed to reduce negative perceptions and attitudes toward the population during teacher training would be beneficial to the literature Ultimately, such applied work would help middle school students get the type of teachers that middle level advocates call for – teachers who value working with the age group and want to be in the middle school setting (Association for Middle Level Education 2010)
Student teachers’ discipline strategies: relations with self-images, anticipated student responses and control orientation
Romi de Jong a *, Jan van Tartwijk b , Theo Wubbels b , Ietje Veldman c and Nico Verloop c aGraduate School of Teaching, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands; bFaculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; c Graduate School of Teaching, ICLON Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Teacher discipline strategies are well documented when it comes to its effects on students and the working climate in the classroom Although it is commonly acknowledged that for student teachers classroom management is a major concern, student teachers‟ use of discipline strategies is largely unknown In this paper, we examine student teachers‟ beliefs in relation to their discipline strategies Three clusters of discipline strategies are distinguished: sensitive, directive and aggressive discipline strategies Beliefs that were taken into account are self-images on control and affiliation, control orientation and anticipated student responses on control and affiliation All participants were student teachers of a one-year teacher education programme for secondary education in the Netherlands Student questionnaires were used to measure discipline strategies (n = 2506) Student teachers‟ (n = 104) self-images, control orientation and anticipated student responses were measured with student teacher questionnaires Results of the multiple regression analyses showed that student teachers‟ sensitive and directive discipline strategies are explained best by self-images on control; aggressive discipline strategies are explained best by self-images on affiliation and by control orientation Apart from the possible academic interest in these particular findings, results are believed to be useful in a practical sense, in particular for teacher education programmes
Student misbehaviour impacts negatively on student learning time and
59 academic achievements (Lewis et al 2005) Teachers use different discipline strategies to deal with student misbehaviour, however not always successfully
Problems with class-room management are one of the main reasons why teachers leave the profession (Evertson and Weinstein 2006; Walker 2009) and for student teachers in particular, classroom management is a major concern (Veenman
1984; Ghaith and Shaaban 1999; Liston, Whitcomb, and Borko 2006) The focus in this paper is on student teachers‟ discipline strategies