Page 244 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

230 CHAPTER 9
overviews and summaries, evaluative adjectives represent an integral part of the writer's description of a work or source.
To this end, particularly in papers written for social sciences and hu- manities courses, after summarizing the information, writers are ex- pected to signal their own views on the topic, issue, or author's tone.
Evaluations of the material obtained from sources necessitate uses of evaluative adjectives and adverbs. Familiarity with these modifiers can allow L2 writers to recognize them in text when they are reading and, addition- ally, employ them in their own writing. Analyses of written academic cor- pora in English have shown that evaluative adjectives belong to the largest class of adjectives followed by descriptors of size.
In academic prose, evaluations of information and the author's tone can be positive or negative depending on whether the main thrust of the paper sup- ports or rejects the ideas expressed in a particular source. For this reason, evaluative adjectives/ adverbs can also be positive or negative. For example,
1. In the history of the United States, the struggle for women's rights plays a very important/special role, [positive]
2. The author accurately presents a clear picture of today's life in Japan. [positive]
3. The currently popular account of causes of youth violence appears to be based on incomplete facts, [negative]
4. The articles blame the threat of overpopulation on controversial/mis- guided/questionable data, [negative]
Anumber ofboth positiveand negative evaluativeadjectivesand adverbs have been identified as more common in academic prose than in any other type of genre (Biber et al., 1999; Swales & Feak, 1994).
Positive Evaluative Adjectives and Adverbs
accurate(-ly) competent(-ly) impressive(-ly) thorough(-ly)
careful (-ly) good/well innovative(-ly) signiflcant(-ly) useful(-ly) clear(-ly) important(-ly) interesting(-ly) special(-ly)
controversial(-ly) inaccurate(-ly) incomplete(-ly)
inconclusive(-ly) limited(-ly) minor
misguided(-ly) questionable(-ly) restricted
unconvincing(-ly) unsatisfactory(-ly)
Negative Evaluative Adjectives
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