Page 81 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

SENTENCES, PHRASES,AND TEXT CONSTRUCTION 67
Sentence structures are always dynamic, but variations among them fol- low predictable patterns that should be explained to students.
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Subject or object slots can be filled by all sorts of words or phrases that belong in the class of nouns/pronouns—for example,
• proper and common nouns (e.g.,John, Smith, desk)
• countable and uncountable nouns (e.g., pens, equipment)
• abstract and concrete nouns (e.g., happiness, a cloud) or gerunds
(e.g., reading, writing)
• compound noun phrases (e.g., vegetable soup, a grammar book)
• pronouns (e.g., /, we,they,one)
• setsofparallel nouns (e.g.,pens,pencils,andpapers;flowers and trees)
Noun phrases include all their attendant elements (e.g., articles,posses- sives, quantifiers, and numerals—a book, (0 article) information, their book, most of the book(s), three books).
In fact, subject and object slots are usually filled by a noun phrase rather than a single-word noun because in real language use single-word nouns are relatively rare (i.e., proper, uncountable, and abstract nouns represent a ma-
jority of all cases). To explain the noun phrase elements to students, the sim- plestwaytoproceed istopracticeidentifying the mainnoun and allitspieces (e.g., vegetable soup/the blue book—does the word vegetable describe the soup'? the word blue describe the book? do these two words go together; most of the book—do the words most, of, and the refer to the book? do all these words go to- gether?). Similar techniques for identifying elements and their order in the verb phrase and the prepositional phrase are discussed later in this chapter.
An important and simple technique for identifying entire noun phrases, as well as their elements, and the singular versus plural properties of sub-
jects is to replace phrases with pronouns. For example,
Marie Curie studied the chemistry and medical uses of radium. She studied the chemistry and medical uses of radium.
Mary Peters and John Smith are planning to attend the conference. [1+ 1]They areplanningtoattendthe conference.
The E-commerce seminar and the technology presentation start at 9 am on Saturdays. They start at 9 am on Saturdays.
The idea to develop a new type of packaging appealed to store managers. /£ appealed to store managers.
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