A Correlational Study Between English Major Students' Nominalization Ability And Academic Discourse Reading Ability

Nominalization as a significant feature of academic discourse has mainly been studied in the paradigm of discourse analysis by focusing on its realization and construction.However,limited research attention has been paid from the perspective of second language acquisition(SLA)to explore the impact of nominalization ability on academic reading ability.To fill the research gap,this study select 70 juniors of English major students as the research subjects and test their nominalizaiton ability,academic vocabulary knowledge and academic reading ability,and analyze their correlations.The current research aims to answer the following questions:(1)To what degree English major students are able to use nominalization?(2)Does students' nominalization ability have an impact on students' academic discourse reading ability?If so,what is it?The major findings include:First,most of the students show weakness in nominalization ability,since they only obtained an average of around 40%of the total score.The score distribution is unbalanced as well.Second,students' nominalization ability has correlation with their academic discourse reading ability(r=3.63,p=0.002).In other words,students with better nominalizaiton ability will achieve higher scores in academic discourse reading.Thirdly,in addition to nominalization ability,students' academic vocabulary ability is also correlated to their academic reading proficiency.Finally,the thesis suggests that:First,in the process of English teaching,teachers should consciously develop students'nominalizaiton ability because it not only helps to improve students' academic discourse reading ability but also their academic writing ability,and particularly make them better-prepared for postgraduate study.Second,the current study reveals that academic vocabulary knowledge also affects students' academic reading ability,this implies that professional vocabulary is indispensible for academic reading.It is suggested that teachers should guide students to enlarge their academic vocabulary and improve their professional proficiency.