Page 242 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

228 CHAPTER 9
cally anywhere in academic text, noun modifiers play a key role in thesis statements and statements of purpose.
Adjectives (and adjective phrases) can be used specifically for marking/signaling thesis statements considered to be obligatory in academic papers and essays (Swales, 1990a; Swales & Feak, 1994). Thesis statements are crucially important to provide coherence in ac- ademic prose, and their function is to highlight and summarize the central idea of the paper—usually in a single and clear sentence.
In many cases thesis statements in L2 academic papers appear to be broad and general, and one of the persistent problems that teachers need to work with students on is how to narrow the thesis down and make sure it has a clear focus.
Relying on adjectivesto delimit the power of nouns can be a practi- cal and useful technique to accomplish this goal.
Research into academic text has shown that thesis statements can be nar- rowed down in two ways:
1. by marking the relational qualities of the essay (i.e., the strategic plan for its development—e.g., two main arguments/different theories), and
2. by restricting the breadth of abstract nouns widely prevalent in ac- ademic writing (e.g., the main character's story of natural and personal disaster).
Corpus analyses of academic prose have shown that the most common adjectives used to refer to the relational qualities of thesis statements in- clude slightly over a dozen:
The top two:
The second
Other possibilities:
five:
same, different
whole, general, major, main, single
basic, common,following, individual,par- ticular,similar,specific, various
(Adapted from Biber et al., 1999)
Relative qualities of the topic delimiters can be used in the following con- texts:
1. The main point of this paper is to discuss two/three major/different influ- ences on/factors in ...
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