Page 234 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

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CHAPTER 9
moreconvenient more detailed
morepowerful more recent
more useful most useful
Overall only a handful of attributive adjectives persistently recur in aca- demic writing. Therefore, it seems reasonable that L2 students need to learn and use them interchangeably in their ownwriting.
ADJECTIVAL AND ADVERBIAL PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES
In academic writing, prepositional phrases are highly frequent—more so than in any other type of writing. Their functions can be either adjectival and adverbial depending on the word or phrase they modify. For example, a prepositional phrase can have the function of an adjective when it modifies a noun (e.g., a dinner at a restaurant) or an adverb when it describes a verb or an entire sentence (e.g., Important clients eat at a restaurant or At a restaurant, we can observe an important separation of goods and services).
Because the contextual uses of prepositional phrases (and prepo- sitions) are often lexicalized, it would be unreasonable to expect that L2 writers learn to use them correctly every time or even in most cases. At the very least, academically bound L2 students need to rec- ognize prepositional phrases when they occur in the texts they read and their own writing.
Academic writing is particularly packed with prepositional phrases because they allow a writer to structure a great deal of information compactly. In fact several adverbial phrases can occur in one sentence, and often they do. It is this particularly high density of prepositional phrases in academic writing that makes them essential for students to know. As mentioned, prepositional phrases are flexible in their syntactic roles, modifying functions, and sentence positions. The extraordinarily high frequency of prepositional phrases, com- bined with their flexibility, is the reason that students have to learn to recognize prepositional phrases and use them appropriately in their ownwriting.
1. Many uses of prepositional phrases in academic writing are idi- omatic and, thus, are difficult to use correctly without learning the specific idiomatic use (Channell, 1994; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). In fact several studies of L2 academic text have demonstrated that NNS writers employ adjectival and adverbial prepositional phrases signifi- cantly differently than NS students do (Hinkel, 1996a, 1997b, 2001a, 2002a, 2003a; Hyland, 1998, 1999). In light of these con-
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