Page 227 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS 213
grammatical repertoire when constructing academic text and may simply lack syntactic and lexical repertoire to express their intended meanings (Jordan, 1997; Read, 2000). To put it simply, focused instruction is essential to help L2 academic writers expand their ranges of simple and complex adjectivals and adverbials they can use in their writing.
THE ESSENTIAL ADJECTIVES (AND ADVERBS)
Similar to the lists of nouns and verbs (see chaps. 5 and 8), a number of adjec- tives and adverbs have been identified as foundational and recurrent in intro- ductory textbooks across various disciplines (Coxhead, 1998, 2000; Nation, 1990, 2001). In fact most of these lexical items are so common that it may be difficult to imagine doing without them in practically any context including academic (e.g., annual, appropriate, classic, constant, identical, or incessant).
In English it may be a little tricky to tell an adjective from an adverb or an adjective from a noun or a verb without context (e.g., an abstract paint- ing—the article abstract, a novel idea—a great novel). This is one of the disad- vantages of word lists. However, if L2 learners are aware that a particular word can have different syntactic functions and notice how these words are used in contexts, learning new and recurrent vocabulary and grammar structures can be made productive and contextually relevant (R. Ellis, 1990, 2002; Schmidt, 1990, 1994, 1995; see also chap. 8).
Most English adverbs are derived from corresponding adjectives and are marked by the suffix -ly, with the exception of those that have identical ad- jective/adverb forms and masquerade as either adjectives (e.g., fast, hard, high) or adverbs (e.g., costly, early, friendly). Because adverbs require an addi- tion of the suffix -ly,adjectives are considered to be lexically and morpho- logically simpler than adverbs because they are the base forms from which adverbs are derived (e.g., accurate—accurately, annual—annually, approxi-
mate—approximately; Adams, 2001; Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, 2001).
For this reason, the University Word List developed by Nation (1990) in- cludes just the adjective form for both adjectives and corresponding ad- verbs. In many analyses of large text corpora, word frequency counts rarely distinguish between adjective and adverb forms of the same lexical base
(sometimes also called word root).
Thus, it is possible to think of learning the 160 adjectives of the list as expanding one's vocabulary by approximately 250 to 260 words (not every adjective has a corresponding adverb—see stative and dy- namic adjectives later). As discussed in chapter 3, research has estab- lished that, for a majority of L2 learners, learning 10 to 15 new words per day represents a reasonable and attainable learning goal (Nation, 2001). Thus, the entire list of essential academic adjectives can actu- ally be learned in slightly under 2 weeks.
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