Page 224 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

210 CHAPTER 9
high rates of intensifying adverbs (e.g., really, very, totally) and low frequen- cies of hedging devices to limit the breadth of generalizations and claims (e.g., many/most, possible/possibly) that are often expected in academic prose (Swales, 1990a; Swales & Feak, 1994; see also chap. 12 on hedges).
To compound some of these discourse-based complexities, syntactic and morphological irregularities among various classes of adjectives and ad- verbs can make L2 academic writing appear particularly error-prone. For instance, a vast majority of ESL teachers are familiar with */ work hardly and walk fastly and *Students are confusing about the assignment types of structures encountered all too often in L2 production. Although errors and misusesof adjectives and adverbs in student texts can appear to be a curse that cannot be broken, many of these problems can be addressed in instruction.
For instance, hard and fast are adverbs, and they do not take the -ly suffix. To find out whether a word is an adjective or adverb, one needs to ask ques- tions how?, when?, where?, or why? All words that answer these questions are adverbs. Nongradable adjectives, such as those that refer to colors or shapes (e.g., blue, long, tall) cannot be turned into adverbs. To see whether an adjec- tive can or cannot become an adverb, a command can be used: *Be blue/long/tall! If the command does not work, an adverb cannot be derived. Similarly, answers to such ubiquitous student questions are actually not complicated: Why can't I say in this month or in last year? Why is I am boring in- correct, if the movie is_boring isperfectly fine ? What's wrong with it is_agood the time
for going shopping? I can say it is_a good day_for_ going shopping, can't I?
The truth of the matter is that many of the constructions that lead stu- dents to these types of errors and questions that teachers deal with daily are actually not difficult to address. These and other adjectival and adverbial mysteries are clarified in this chapter.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ADJECTIVES (AND ADVERBS) IN ACADEMIC PROSE
The syntacticfunction of adjectives is to modify nouns and noun phrases, and adverbs similarly modify verbs. Thus, it stands to reason that if nouns predominate in academic prose, so would adjectives to describe them. The following example, a short paragraph from an introductory textbook on business and economics, consists of 83 words and contains four definitions, all of which pivot on at least nine attributive and predicative adjectives.
(1) Management is the effective and efficient integration and coordination of re- sources to achieve desired objectives. Efficiency refers to the ratio of benefits to costs as resources are used and depleted to produce goods and services. Effectiveness refers to the degree to which the company's goals are being attained.Managers are those people who areresponsiblefor ensuring that this happens. A manager integrates and combines human, capital, and technological resources in the best way possible to ensure that the
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