Page 122 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

108 CHAPTER 5
Irregular Plural Forms of Nouns. Other highly common nouns from the University Word List and Academic Word List that have irregular plu- ral forms are: axis, crisis, criteria, emphasis,focus, hypothesis, index, matrix, me- dia/medium, overseas, parenthesis, pendulum, phenomenon, radius, series, species, strata,thesis.
All nouns that end in -is take the plural marker -es (crises, emphases, hypotheses, parentheses), -ex/ix endings become plural -ces(indices, matrices), -um nouns take -a (medium—media, stratum—strata), and -on endings have the plural form of -a (criterion—criteria, phenomenon—phenomena). Such nouns as overseas, series, and species have identical plural and singular forms (one series—several series, one species—many species).
These nouns are not likely to be frequent in conversations and daily spoken interactions. For this reason, they probably cannot be learned in the course of routine communications and activities for developing conversa- tional fluency (see chap. 1). This may be one of the reasons that the vocabulary of even advanced and proficient L2 students does not include them. Although teachers may attempt to design activities and exercises to provide students practice with these nouns, it is doubtful that many enjoyable tasks can be constructed with nouns such as axis, crisis, and hypothesis. Nonetheless, it is essential for students to know the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling of these nouns at least to recognize them when they appear in academic reading and lectures. There are few better solutions to the dilemma of their learning beyond simple memorization and contextualized practice and use. The key to success in students' vocabu- lary learning is the teacher's insistence that essential vocabulary nouns be used when they are needed.
SINGULAR AND PLURAL NOUNS WITH DIFFERENT MEANINGS
Many essential countable nouns such as business, development, difficulty, fail- ure, industry, injustice, technology, and truth have different meanings in singu- lar and plural forms.When used in singular they refer to concepts or whole notions, and when used in plural they refer to specific instances, types, kinds, and occurrences of these notions. The singular form technology refers to all types of technology as a concept, but the plural technologies to various types/subsets of technology such as computer, automotive, or telecommuni- cation. For example,
The development of economy is the most important job of the government in my coun- try. (From a student text.)
In this sentence, the noun development refers to the entire collective notion that consists of many components, such as the development of
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