Nominal complexities in school children’s informational writing

Fang, Zhihui; Gresser, Valerie; Cao, Peijuan; Zheng, Jack

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2021.100958

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Compared with elementary children in prior studies (e.g., Fang, 2014; Fang et al, 2021), the sixth-grade students in our study appeared to use a wider range and a higher frequency of grammatical features characteristic of structural compression. That is, they employed a slightly greater number and a wider variety of phrasal resources, such as appositive as noun modifier, noun as noun premodifier, and nominalization.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 74%

“…Thus, it is possible that without frequent exposure and/or explicit scaffolding, students may not have adequately internalized the grammatical features of compression for effective use in their own writing. In several recent studies (e.g., Fang et al, 2020Fang et al, , 2021Ravid & Berman, 2010), for example, researchers found that the noun phrases used in school children's writing tend to be short and simple, and although the complexity of these noun phrases grow with advancing grade levels (e.g., becoming longer, including more modifiers and more varied types of modifiers, revealing greater syntactic depth, and employing semantically more abstract nouns as heads), such growth is typically not salient until late adolescence or adulthood. And many adult Englishspeaking writers never master this compressed style of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Genre and Register Features of Sixth-Grade Students’ Factual Writing

Fang

Gresser

Cao

et al. 2022

Written Communication

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Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing—biography and report—composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students’ understanding of the nature of science. These texts were analyzed for a range of schematic, lexical, and grammatical features that instantiate the two target genres. Statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that the students demonstrated a fairly mature control over the schematic and lexical features that realize the purpose of either genre and relied heavily on the grammatical resources characteristic of everyday registers in constructing both genres. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between the students’ genre/register familiarity and the holistic quality of their writing, and the students’ reading proficiency was a significant predictor of their genre familiarity and holistic writing quality, but not their register understanding. These findings suggest that learning the grammatical resources characteristic of academic registers remains a major and potentially daunting task for many adolescents.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 74%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genre and Register Features of Sixth-Grade Students’ Factual Writing

Fang

Gresser

Cao

et al. 2022

Written Communication

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“…More research addresses how productive cross-disciplinary language resources (e.g., vocabulary, nominal group extension) contribute to the quality of school genres beyond the text length (Fang et al, , 2021Fang & Park, 2020). The contribution of receptive and productive cross-disciplinary language skills to the quality of science genres is explored minimally; only middle students' science summaries are considered (Phillips Uccelli et al, 2019).…”

Section: The Role Of Disciplinary and Cross-disciplinary Language Ski...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-disciplinary language changes in 4th graders as a predictor of the quality of written scientific explanation

Meneses

Montenegro

Acevedo

et al. 2023

JoWR

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“…Неслучайно специалисты в области преподавания английского как иностранного постоянно подчеркивают важность обучения «порождению» номинативных конструкций в английском языке («Nominal resources deserve greater attention in academic literacy instruction» [Fang et al, 2021, p. 5;; Noun-noun collocations are particularly difficult to generate and use for those students, that do not have the same constructions in their own language [Hua et al, 2019, p. 156]). Специалисты обращают внимание на их часто «коллокационный» («устойчивый», фразеологизированный) характер и создают большое количество разнообразных по тематике, уровню обучения и целям соответствующие специальные лингвистические онлайн-и офлайн-ресурсы [Fang et al, 2021], количество и качество которых постоянно увеличивается и улучшается.…”

Section: номинативность в английском языке: основной вид номинативных конструкцийunclassified

Cognitive Dominants, Language-Specific Communication and Translation Problems

Ri︠a︡bt︠s︡eva

2021

jour

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The paper is devoted to explaining the key cognitive distinctions characteristic to translation process and its teaching. Among them are linguistic interpretation of the input text’s contents, its conceptual adaptation to the accepting culture, etc. To demonstrate them, multiple examples are given to show that translators, particularly not trained enough, often choose for basic translation dominants in the accepting culture those equivalents that are primarily purely linguistic, ignoring conceptual and cultural background of the original and the accepting culture’s notions and forms. Meanwhile, the latter help avoid such translation failures as literal / word by word translation, etc. Special attention in the paper is paid to the translation into the foreign, English, language, its contrastive culture-specific and communicative features as compared to those in the Russian language: to their cognitive dominants in communication and their cross-linguistic asymmetry and in-congruency which generate quite «natural» cross-linguistic interference in Russian-English translation. It is particularly obvious when there are extensive textual nominal ex-pressions, especially terminological, which demonstrate at present an active, extensive and productive usage in English, but present a serious problem in teaching English as a foreign language and translation into it. It is also shown that in Russian their cross-linguistic idiomatic analogues are language specific and show different patterns, but still can be adequately matched with their foreign counter-parts.

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Nominal complexities in school children’s informational writing

Cited by 9 publications

References 16 publications

Genre and Register Features of Sixth-Grade Students’ Factual Writing

Genre and Register Features of Sixth-Grade Students’ Factual Writing

Cross-disciplinary language changes in 4th graders as a predictor of the quality of written scientific explanation

Cognitive Dominants, Language-Specific Communication and Translation Problems

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