A Study Of Nominalization Acquisition In Chinese English Major Learners

Nominalization is a process by which either a noun or a syntactic unit functioning as a noun phrase is derived from any process, property, environment or clause. In this process, congruent forms originally embodied by verbs or adjectives are reworded metaphorically as nouns by rank-shift. From a functional point of view, nominalization is the most powerful source of grammatical metaphor and a mark distinguishing written discourses from oral discourses. Arising from the need of construing human experience metaphorically, nominalization has the power of making texts concise, coherent and formal. For second language learners, second language writing is a process of construing their cognition using that language. So their second language writing ability can indicate their second language cognition level. Within the framework of functional linguistics, the present study assumes that the colloquialism and informality in Chinese EFL learners'written output is due to the lack of nominalization. To test this assumption, a statistic research is conducted by employing a contrastive interlanguage analysis approach.The subjects in this study are 112 English major students ranging from Grade-1 to Grade-3.Timed compositions in a designated topic are collected in class as samples to test the three hypotheses derived from the basic assumption. Statistic analysis confirms that the mean frequency of nominalizations of the whole sample is significantly lower than that of English native speakers; the mean frequencies of different grades vary significantly; the subjects show a preference of using nominalizations in the position of object rather than subject. In reference to contrastive analysis between Chinese and English as well as the features of nominalization in the compositions, the study comes to a conclusion that mother tongue interference and inadequate English language awareness lead to nominalization underuse and misuse in English major students in China.To solve the problems, the study suggests that teachers should enhance input by explicit instruction and adopt a process-focused approach in teaching writing to improve the students' English language awareness in both inputting and outputting stages. This can help facilitate the students'nominalization acquisition, thus improve their English proficiency.