Page 121 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

NOUNS ANDTHE NOUN PHRASE 107
Nouns that refer to languages and people can also be used in the adjective form (e.g., American professors, Chinese/Japanese speakers). If these language/people nouns are immediately followed by another noun, they are used as adjectives. In this case, they never take the plural form no matter what ending they have (see Compound Nouns).
A good rule of thumb is to identify the nouns and adjectives of the people/languages type that frequently show up in students' texts or are simply very common and focus on these particular items instead of trying to work with the entire list of irregular plurals. In this case, the nouns hair, help,
junk, space, music, rain, snow, poverty, news, progress, people, pride, sleep, vocabulary, grammar,slang, and life are highlyproductive,whereasflour,chalk, corn, grass, silver, gold, dirt, and dust may be less so.
Possessives. Possessive nouns are relatively rare in academic prose and structures such as: ?Indonesia's economy,? company's management,? course's as- signments usually sound awkward. In most cases where L2 writers employ these constructions, possessives should be replaced with adjective + noun or compound noun constructions:
Indonesian economy, company management, course assignments. Possessive constructions are usually limited to nouns that refer to humans:
John's lunch, teacher's pet.
However, even in the case of nouns that refer to groups of humans, the use of possessives can be obscure:
*faculty's lounge, *employee's quarters, *government's benefits.
In those cases where possessivescan be used, the rule to follow is that if the noun is singular (aboy/a nurse), the apostrophe is placed at the end of the singular noun (a boy's/a nurse's). However, if the noun is plural (students/
professors), the apostrophe is still placed at the end of the noun, and only one -s is needed (students'/professors'). If the teacher has limited time to work on various structures, possessives can be skipped because they are compara- tively rare in student texts.
ESSENTIAL NOUNS IN ACADEMIC TEXTS
An important point to remember is that the University Words List and Aca- demic Word List (Nation, 1990, 2001) include only a handful of noncount nouns that are essential for students to use correctly: alcohol, atmosphere,awe, biology, consent, equipment, ethics,friction, geography, geometry, gravity, hemi- sphere, inflation, integrity, intimacy, labor, logic, mathematics, minimum, maximum, navy, philosophy, pollution, prestige, psychology, reluctance, research, sociology, trade, traffic, vocabulary, welfare.
Common Nouns That Are Always Plural, (and, therefore, require plu- ral verb forms, when used in the subject position) include: clothes, glasses,
grounds, jeans, odds, pants, people, savings, shorts, stairs, surroundings, tropics.
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