A Corpus-based Study Of Nominalization In DUT Postgraduates' English Abstracts

It has been observed that one of the distinguishable features between written and spoken English is the frequent distribution of nominalization in written English, which often results in grammatical simplification and lexical density of written English. English nominalization is the main feature of written English with functions of making text cohesive, concise, objective and so on, it is necessary to observe the writings of Chinese students to discover how nominalization is applied in their works.The present study employs a corpus-based approach to investigate the features of nominalization in abstracts of thesis written by postgraduates studying in DUT from a functional perspective. According to this research's purpose, two corpora are established for contrastive study through the statistic softwares EXCEL and SPSS.The research compares the difference of nominalization usage and frequency between DUT postgraduates and native speakers, and same comparison is also conducted among the four sub-groups in DUT corpus according to the abstracts qualities. It is not surprising to find that postgraduates in DUT applied nominalization less frequent as that of native speakers. Besides the statistic analysis, this study also employ a questionnaire as a plus to investigate the awareness of nominalization in DUT postgraduates in order to find out that how nominalization is taught in the English writing class. The questionnaire shows that teachers are seldom teaching the knowledge of nominalizations and its related staffs. This maybe. indicates that there still leaves a great room for the improvement of English writing both for teachers and students.Based on the findings of this research, the author also points out the implications for the teaching of English Writing. Teachers in English writing course can employ more methods to let students get familiar with nominalization and improve their awareness of nominalization, help students know the problems existing in their abstract writing, draw their attentions to the variations between English and Chinese abstracts and improve their abilities in English writing.