A Study On The Application Of Nominal Group Expanding In College English Writing Teaching

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills in learning English. The ability to write well in English for EFL learners is a crucial factor for student success in learning English. Latest researches on EFL writing are mainly carried out from the four perspectives including situational context, personal features, text analysis and teaching. Various researches are conducted with different focuses, among which few focus on nominal groups in EFL writing. These studies about nominal groups are conducted from the perspective of text analysis. No studies are conducted from the perspective of nominal group application in EFL writing teaching. This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of Nominal Group Expanding in EFL writing teaching, on one hand, to fill in the gap, one the other hand, to verify the pedagogical suggestions recommended by the earlier studies.Nominal groups play important roles in English writing. It becomes more and more important that university students add meaning into nominal groups to make their essays nominal instead of clausal complexity(Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). Based on Halliday‘s(2004) description of nominal group in Systemic Functional Grammar, the author tries to apply Nominal Group Expanding to College English writing class. In order to examine the effectiveness of Nominal Group Expanding in EFL writing teaching, the author carries out a one-semester teaching experiment. The students in this study are freshmen from a college in Changchun, Jilin Province. Two classes are involved, with one as the control group(CG) and the other as the experimental group(EG). This study attempts to explore the effectiveness of Nominal Group Expanding in EFL writing teaching. Three research questions addressed in this study are as follows: 1. What are the characteristics of nominal group application in students‘ writing before and after the experiment? 2. After the experiment, are there any changes in the use of nominal groups in students‘ writing? If yes, why? If no, why not? 3. How to improve students‘ English writing ability through Nominal Group Expanding?The data is analyzed in quantitative and qualitative ways to guarantee the reliability and validity of this study. Results show that students‘ abilities to pack more information in nominal groups to convey ideas improve through Nominal Group Expanding, and writing scores in the experimental group improve more across the whole semester than that in the control group. Nominal Group Expanding has a positive effect on the improvement of students‘ writing ability.Limitations of this thesis and suggestions for future study are brought out at the end of the thesis.