A Cross-Sectional Study On The Development Of Nominalization In Writing Of English Majors

As one of the most important features of written language,nominalization has the function of encapsulation and condensation.In addition,nominalization,one of the important symbols of discourse formality,is of great significance to English learners in argumentative writing.Therefore,it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the current situation of nominalization in English writing.In recent years,domestic scholars have mainly studied the generic features of nominalization and the acquisition of nominalization by second language learners.In terms of the studies on the acquisition of nominalization,different researchers draw different conclusions.This thesis attempts to examine the development of nominalization through the college years and the characteristics of nominalization used by English majors in English writing.The participants of this study were 246 writing samples written by 82 English major students who were from the first,second and fourth grade in a university in Jiangxi Province.The compositions for the three grades were designed by their teacher according to the courses and collected at the end of term.In this study,words of nominalization were operationalized by retrieving the words with the following forms “-ce,-cy,-ment,-ion,-ure,-ity,-ness,-th,-ity,-ing,to do”.To ensure the accuracy of the results,we manually checked the retrieval results and excluded some words that were similar in morphology but did not belong to the list of nominalizations.Ant Conc 3.3.4 and statistical software SPSS 22.0 were used to analyze the data.We intended to answer the following three questions:(1)Do students of the senior grades adopt more nominalizations than students of the junior grades?(2)What are the characteristics of nominalization used by freshmen,sophomores and seniors of English majors respectively?(3)Do the instances of nominalization in English majors' compositions achieve the function of objectivity of discourse,lexical density and textual cohesion?The results are listed as follows:(1)The use of nominalization by higher graders is significantly higher than that of lower graders.In other word,the frequency of nominalization has a positive relationship with English proficiency.With the growthof the grade and the improvement of English proficiency,students' academic writing ability develops,thus contributing to the rising trend of nominalization.(2)Both similarities and differences exist in the use of nominalization among English majors.The commonality lies in that the use of nominalization basically follows the same order,which,to some extent,reflects the acquisition order of nominalization used by English majors.However,in the process of writing,students are accustomed to avoid using unfamiliar suffixes to generate new nominal words,which leads to the excessive use of nominalizations ending with-ion.In addition,nominalization mostly appears in the object position due to the influence of the native language.The significant difference is mainly reflected in the fact that senior students not only adopt more nominal elements than junior students,but also show the characteristics of diversity with the improvement of English proficiency.(3)Most nominalizations used by English majors in their compositions have achieved the expected function.However,there are still many problems to be improved,such as collocation of delexical verb and a colloquial style of expression due to the insufficient understanding of congruent form and metaphorical form as well as the functions of nominalization.The above findings offer some implications for English writing teaching in China.Firstly,the designs of the syllabus,the decisions about curriculum and the arrangements of teaching contents should follow students' acquisition order;Secondly,diversified compositions on different topics should be provided for students,which enables them to use more different types of nominalization.Thirdly,the role of explicit instruction in nominalization should be emphasized to help learners understand the nominal expressions in reading tasks.Finally,students should be encouraged to use nominalization in their academic writing.