Page 174 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

160 CHAPTER7
to the news are hearing about the high cost of recycling that makes it too expensive for the industry to continue collecting metal and paper. The news quote recycling plant owners and operators who are depending on recyclingfor theirjobs and who are com- plaining that there is simply not enough material to recycle for them to earn a living and that operating too many plants is costing too much. So, the plant owners propose to close down some of their collection centers and reduce recycling. However, the plant owners and news media are dealing with this problem totally incorrectly. They need to educate the public to recycle more instead of closing down plants that will lead to the public recycling less. (Extracted from a student paper on how to educate the public on recycling.)
The progressive tenses are exceptionally rare with verbs such as concern, hear, depend, and cost. Thus, their use of nonprogressive verbs in progres- sive tenses needs to be avoided, and simple tenses can be used instead. However, in real contexts the issue may seem to be more complex than just simply changing the aspect of the nonprogressive verbs because other verbs, such as complain and deal found in the same context, are perfectlyac- ceptable in the progressive form: are complaining and are dealing.
Two points are important to remember:
• Progressive verbs seldom occur in academic writing.
• A number of important academic verbs are not used in the progres-
sive aspect, and these verbs need to be learned.
Thus, in academic writing, it may be best to avoid progressive tenses.
THE ACTIVE VOICE AND THE PASSIVE VOICE IN ACADEMIC WRITING
The form and grammatical derivation of passive constructions can be found in all ESL grammar books. For example:
The student bought the book. -> The book was bought by the student. John helped the boy. -> The boy was helped byJohn
Because passive derivations are highly regular in their form, L2 learners generally quicklyfigure out how to convert active constructions into passive ones. Then when it comes to fill in the blank exercises on sentence convert- ing, learners fill in all the blanks, and their learning of how to use the pas- sive voice is thus completed.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with other English structures, the uses of passives in real academic writing are far more complex than doing exer- cises in an ESL grammar textbook or filling in the blanks.
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