Page 223 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

Adjectives and Adverbs in Academic Discourse
OVERVIEW
• Essential academic adjectives (and derived adverbs)
• Expanding the lexical range of adverbs and adjectives
• How to distinguish adjectives and adverbs
• Comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs in academic text
• Prepositional phrases with adjectival and adverbial functions
• Participles and infinitives as modifiers
• Adjectives in thesis statements
Textual and discourse functions of adjectives and adverbs represents one of the key areas in L2 instruction on grammar and lexis. In written academic discourse, adjectives and adverbs can perform a variety of rhetorical func- tions, many of which are discussed in some detail in this chapter. Although adjectives and adverbs are not as numerous as nouns and verbs, adjectives, for instance, are extraordinarily frequent in academic writing—much more so than in conversational discourse or other types of writing (Biber et al., 1999). According to Huddleston and Pullum (2002), practically every sen- tence includes adjectives and/or adverbs.
For L2 learners, adjectives and adverbs often present a number of prob- lems. To begin, various studies of NNS academic writing and text have shown that L2 writers often do not employ adjectives and adverbs in ways congruent with the norms of formal academic and professional writing (Hinkel, 1995b, 1997b, 1999a, 2003a; Hyland, 1998, 1999, 2002b; Hyland & Milton, 1997; Johnson, 1989b). For instance, advanced NNS writers use significantly fewer attributiveadjectivesand significantlymore predicative adjectives than NS students with less training in writing and composition (Hinkel, 2002a). In addition, L2 academic texts often contain particularly
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