Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
In English writing, nominal group is a crucial component. Parkinson and Musgrave (2017) point out that it becomes more and more important that university students add meaning into nominal groups to make their essays nominal instead of clausal complexity. Liardét (2017: 168) states that ―The extensive condensation of information into an elaborated nominal group allows for the clear structuring of the text and the organization of the Given-New prosody valued in academic discourses. In order to add meaning into nominal groups, the noun needs expanding by adding pre-modifiers and post-modifiers. The development of expanded nominal groups in English writing is to enable textual flexibility and expression of abstract concepts. In the development of adolescent writing in the first language (L1) EFL contexts, the ability to pack information into nominal groups has been regarded as an significant element (Maxwell-Reid, 2017). There are more noun phrases with pre-modifiers and post-modifiers in English writing than in English speech (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). Complex noun phrases distribute more frequently in written language and simple noun phrases are more common in spoken language (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985). Bai and Cang (2017) point out that if writers want to covey novel opinions and novel news, usually they need employ more complex nominal groups in English. Nominal groups have not drawn attention in EFL writing teaching nowadays. EFL writing teaching helps students to master EFL writing skill and improve EFL writing competence. There are numerous researches on EFL writing teaching, mainly dealing with a series of instructive principles, such as the discussion on product approach, process approach (Wang, 1986; Li, 2017; Zhang & Zhou, 2017; Hu, 2017; Yang & Chan, 2017), genre approach (Wang, 1992; Han & Qin, 2017; Zeng, 2017; Fang & Fang, 2017). There are also numerous researches on the specific methods and various techniques in the practice of EFL teaching, such as the combination of reading and writing through sample analysis (Li, 1997; Wu, 2017; Dong, 2017; He, 2017), the combination of spoken，英语论文网站，英语论文 |
