Page 288 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

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CHAPTER 10
makeerrors intheseconstructions,willyouconsiderthesestudents to be ready for academic work in mainstream courses? Among the many types of errors that students are likely to make with these structures, which ones would you consider to be more severe or less severe? Why? Would you make such distinctionsin the gravityof er- rors in subordinate clauses? Which ones and why?
2. Aswas discussed in chapter 4, it is important for L2 writers to learn to identify sentence elements such as subject phrases and head sub- ject nouns, auxiliary verbs, main verbs, and objects. However, it is quite common that at the college level even native speakers of Eng- lish are not always able to identify subject, verb, and object phrases correctly. In this case, how proficient should non-native speakers become in identifying sentence parts? Is it reasonable to expect non-native speakers to become better at identifying sentence ele-
ments than many native speakers are? Why or why not?
3. The following sentences include subordinate clauses. Can you identify their sentence functions and explain your decision? Are
these sentence acceptable in formal academic writtenEnglish?
• • • • •
Many L2 writers dislike learning vocabulary—a common problem that can bother ESL teachers.
It goes without saying that learning to write academic essays in a second language takes a great deal of work.
Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, which came as a complete surprise to his contemporaries.
In Wisconsin and other Great Lake states, snowstorms can produce large amounts of precipitation, which can impede transportation.
At a recent gathering of environmentalists, angry spats arose between the proponents and opponents of conservation, which were relished by the media.
4. In your opinion, why do fewer sentence fragment errors occur with adjective and noun clauses than with adverb clauses?
5. In many constructions it is perfectly acceptable to mix the past and future tenses:
• This morning, psychologists announced to the media that they will finish the experiment next year.
• John told Sue that he will buy a new computer when he is ready.
• The spokeswoman for thepresident stated that no new taxes will be imple-
mented in theforthcoming future.
In your opinion, in what contexts and under what circumstances is it acceptable to mix the past and future tenses? Can you come up with a quick rule to explain this distinction to students?
6. Would the semantic or structural regularities (and irregularities) of English be easier for L2 learners to deal with in their academic writ- ing? Why? By the same token, would discourse organization or sen-
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