خلاصة:
The language register used in academic communities has the special features of density, complexity, and abstractness which are associated with nominalization with which new members of the communities might not be familiar. To explore the possible distance between novice and established members regarding their awareness of this grammatical feature, the present study investigated the employment of nominalization in the writings of Iranian graduate students (both MA and PhD students) and experienced figures in applied linguistics. Forty five research articles in the discipline by the three groups of writers served as the corpus of the study. A rigorous analysis began by identifying and outlining nominalization instances manually through and per all rhetorical sections of the articles. The occurrences of the two types of nominal expressions was counted and normalized. So as to detect the possible significant differences between the samples, chi-square tests were run. The results revealed that the experienced writers used significantly more nominalization in their writings. However, although the total nominal expressions used in MA texts were more than those used in PhD texts, the difference turned out not to be significant. There were also similarities and variations in the ranking patterns of the two types of nominalization in four rhetorical sections of the three groups of the articles. It can be concluded that the differences might reflect the distance between the novice and the established authors regarding their awareness of the importance of nominalization in academic writing. The implications of the study for EAP courses were also discussed.
ملخص الجهاز:
To explore the possible distance between novice and established members regarding their awareness of this grammatical feature, the present study investigated the employment of nominalization in the writings of Iranian graduate students (both MA and PhD students) and experienced figures in applied linguistics.
Some of them have compared spoken with written academic discourse (Norouzi, Khomeijani Farahani, & Borzabadi Farahani, 2012); some have investigated the differences and similarities between discourses produced by natives and non-natives (Kazemi, 2014; Mahbudi, Mahbudi, & Amalsaleh, 2014; Naghizadeh & Naghizadeh, 2014; Terblanche, 2009; Wenyan, 2012); others have been interested in exploring nominalization distribution cross- linguistically (Jallilifar & Shirali, 2014); and some others have detected the historical variation of this grammatical metaphor in specific discourse (Banks, 2008).
The present study, with the hope to bridge the gap, incorporates the concept of academic register in that it seeks to explore whether Iranian graduate students as novice members, compared to experienced writers as established members of academic communities, use nominalization more or less frequently in their academic papers.
To this end, it decides to explore the possible distance existing between the Iranian graduate student writers as novice members and experienced authors as established ones in terms of employment and distribution of nominalization as an important feature of scientific register.
1. The Corpus As the purpose of the study is to investigate and compare the use and distribution of nominalization in English research papers written by apprentice scientific writers and their experienced counterparts, forty five research articles in the field of applied linguistics, drawn from widely read journals, were selected for investigation.