Effects of explicit instruction in nominalisation on ESL learners’ academic writing

Extant research has highlighted the essentiality of grammatical metaphor (GM) as a linguistic resource in academic writing. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study investigated relationship between explicit instruction nominalisation one type GM and ESL learners’ mastery key resource. Adopting true experimental design, involved 38 Filipino professionals Singapore who needed to pass IELTS for or professional purposes. The students group received nine hours various aspects nominalisation, whereas those control same amount focusing error analysis, formality language, well use Academic Word List (AWL) British National Corpus. Comparisons texts produced by response timed writing tasks revealed quantitative qualitative differences frequencies nominalisations employed, lexical density texts, quality essay organisation. findings constitute new evidence importance powerful helping learners write that are valued academia.