Representing actions with nouns
|
Students' problems | page 2 of 7 |
Understanding heavily nominalised text
Nominalisation can be difficult enough for native speakers to process and understand, so it is not surprising that students have difficulty working out the meaning of nominalisations, especially when many are used together in academic writing.
Some very interesting observations have been made about some of the problems students
have when reading science books 
. One problem concerns the
difficulty that students might have when unpacking 
a string of nouns such as lung cancer death rates 
:
Lung cancer death rates are clearly associated with increased smoking.
This whole clause is ambiguous. How does the reader know what exactly the writer means here? Is it "how many people die from lung cancer", or "how quickly people die when they do get lung cancer", or even "how quickly people's lungs die from cancer".
There is also ambiguity with increased smoking. Does increased smoking mean "people smoke more", or "more people smoke" or is it a combination of the two: "more people smoke more"?
This clause may be ambiguous to many students for another reason, because the phrase are associated with can face in either direction and mean either "cause" or "are caused by". Adults know that smoking causes cancer, but students will not necessarily make this connection.
For some of the teaching implications related to unpacking heavily nominalised text,
see
Representing actions with nouns: Teaching implications (p 3).
Introduction
Understanding heavily nominalised text
