A Study Of Nominalization In EFL Writing: Differences Between Freshmen And Juniors And Correlation With Writing Quality

Nominalization is a distinctive feature of written English. The present thesis attempts to find out whether there is difficulty for Chinese college students to apply nominalization in their English writing and whether nominalization is correlated with writing quality. The study in the thesis compared nominalization in writing products of freshmen and juniors so as to find out the tendency of nominalization acquisition. Sixty papers of the same topic, half of which were written by freshmen and the other half by juniors in their normal class sessions, were randomly selected for investigation. The sampled papers, strictly controlled within the length of 290-310 words, were analyzed in light of nominalization proposed by Halliday.It was found that there is an increasing tendency in nominalization application with the improvement of language proficiency. Significant differences showed up between freshmen and juniors in nominalization use. That is, juniors used more nominalizations than freshmen did. In addition, the writing quality was correlated to nominalization distribution. Namely, the more nominalizations are used, the higher the writing quality would be. Moreover, there was no significant difference in verbal, adjectival and clausal nominalization between freshmen and juniors. Furthermore, nominalization of each type in good group was not significantly different from that in poor group. At the same time, the findings indicated that there is difficulty for students to apply nominalizations in their English writing, thus Chinese students' awareness and capability of nominalization application should be improved. Therefore, teachers should try to help students improve their use of nominalization in the teaching of reading, writing and design some exercises such as sentence pattern transformation. Teachers should stress nominalization and try to input the knowledge of nominalization practically and specifically. This will benefit students gradually and substantially and this certainly helps them to overcome their difficulties in understanding and applying nominalizations.