A Corpus-based Study Of Nominalization In Writings Of Chinese Students Majoring In English

Nominalization is a distinctive feature of written English. Simply speaking, itrefers to the process of deriving a noun or syntactic unit functioning as a noun phrasefrom words of other word classes. Since Jesperson’s first attempt in1924, substantialstudies have been carried out on nominalization. After1985, some corpus-basedstudies have been conducted based on authentic texts. Previous corpus-based studiesimplemented by Chinese scholars mainly focus on two aspects: stylistic features ofnominalization and Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of nominalization. The researchresults on the stylistic features are unanimous, that is, nominalization is in proportionwith the formality of texts. However, studies concerning the second aspects are few innumber and controversial in findings. Therefore, the author decides to study thenominalization usage in Chinese students’ writings.The corpus of the present study is composed of100essays written by studentsof Xi’an International Studies University, freshmen and juniors respectively. With thehelp of retrieving software AntConc3.2and statistical software SPSS, the authorstudies the relationship between nominalization distribution and writing score. Thespecific research questions are:(1) Is nominalization distribution correlated to writingscore?(2) Is nominalization more frequently used in juniors’ writings than in thefreshmen’s?(3) Does good writing contain more nominalization of each type of suffixcompared with poor writing? The research results are (1) Nominalization distributionis closely related with writing score.(2) Juniors use more nominalization in theirwritings than freshmen do.(3) Good writing does not contain more nominalization ofeach type of suffix compared with poor writing. Besides, examples extracted fromstudents’ writing indicate that there are both cases of proper and improper usage ofnominalization. Based on these findings, the author proposes two methods to increasestudents’ ability of applying nominalization in their writings. First, teachers should paymore attention to the importance of nominalization and give more formal instructionson the textual functions nominalization. Second, more reading or comparison exercise could be raised to improve students’ ability to use nominalization in specific situation.In these ways, students could get more comprehensive understanding ofnominalization and the cases of improper usage will be cut down.