Page 276 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

262 CHAPTER 10
In teaching wh-questions to noun clause conversions, it is impor- tant to emphasize that students need to:
a) identify the entire subject slot to determine where to put be- and modal verbs
b) locate the head noun in the subject slot to figure out whether it is singular or plural to attend to subject-verb agreement
Embedding questionswith subject wh-wordsimmediatelyfollowed by
main verbs does not require moving any elements of the noun clause:
What determines status or class within society? Hegel's theory explains what determines status or class within society.
What distinguishes philosophy from theology? This essay presents Burke's views on what distinguishes philosophy from theology.
Caveat: In examples such as What aresomeproblems with Bentham's utilitar- ian theory?, the sentence subject is the noun phrase someproblems, and not the relative pronoun what. As mentioned earlier, it is necessary to identify the entire subject noun phrase and head noun to convert wh -questions to noun clauses. To locate the subject and head noun, the litmus test is a full-sen- tence response to the question:
What are some problems with Bentham's utilitarian theory? Some problems with Bentham's theory are xxx.
What distinguishes philosophy from theology? YYY distinguishes philosophy from theology.
After direct questions are converted into statements, no question mark is
needed: It is replaced by a period to mark the end of the sentence. This is an
important point to make in teaching: The concept of a sentence and
marked sentence boundaries is difficult even for NS students. To add to the
mix, the syntactic distinctions between questions and sentences, marked by 3
intonationaloneinmanylanguages, maybeparticularlypuzzlingtospeak- ers of many languages (e.g., the inverted subject-verb order, not to mention the separation of verbs into various parts, and questions marks).
Yes/No Questions as Noun Clauses. With yes/no questions that have no wh- words (e.g., does utilitarian theory explain xxx?...), a wh- word must be added—whether. For example,
3
In many Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, such as Russian, Ukrainian,
and Arabic, questions are intonation marked.
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