A Study On The Effects Of Nominalization In EFL Reading

As an important and major expression of metaphors, nominalization is a common and popular phenomenon in English. Most researchers studied it from formational or functional perspectives. There are also many studies on whether nominalizations contribute to reading comprehension or not from many different schools. But the only factor"difficulty"cannot explain this complex phenomenon. Therefore, the present thesis will study nominalization from cognitive perspective. The paper analyzes the effects of nominalization in the reading process on the basis of Chinese learners who learn English as foreign language. The main two research questions are the following.1. Does nominalization contribute to or hinder the reading comprehension?2. Based on the findings of Question One, what effects does nominalization have on readers in a particular text?What effects does nominalization cause in the reading process? Halliday believes that nominalizations can increase difficulty in discourse. And then some teachers avoid nominalizations in organizing input materials in order not to give much difficulty on the learners. Based on Goatly's Green Grammar Theory and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance theory, the thesis raises different hypotheses on the effects of nominalization from cognitive perspective in English reading.In the experimental group, the participants got the same scores as the controlled group with less cognitive effort in reading the text with nominalizations. At the same time the text with nominalizations bring about different cognitive effects on the readers, compared with the text in congruent form. The cognitive effects are a complex psychological phenomenon. But it at least includes stylistic effects and social effects. The text with nominalization can bring the succinct, condensed, concise, objective and formal effects on readers, and this feature makes nominalization more preferable in the scientific and legal style. On the other hand, nominalizations in text can encode ideology and values in an implicit way, and this is often employed by some politicians to express their opinions to convince people their hidden real motives.The results of the study may provide a different perspective to perceive this common linguistic phenomenon in English and enlighten the English teachers and learners to treat nominalization in a proper way in their reading process.