“All These Nouns Together Just Don’t Make Sense!”: An Investigation of EAP Students’ Challenges with Complex Noun Phrases in First-Year College-Level Textbooks

Abstract

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988; 2004). However, in spite of the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are often overlooked in preparatory English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. This mixed methods study aims to investigate to what extent CNP present syntactic parsing challenges for upper-level college EAP students, and whether there is a perceived need for direct instruction in CNP in EAP programs. A special CNP proficiency test was administered to 70 upper-level Ontario college EAP students and a native speaker comparator group, and the results were compared with those obtained from interviews with seven of the test-takers. The results obtained from the statistical analyses and the interviews indicate that CNP are challenging to parse for upper-level EAP students and that direct instruction in CNP may be beneficial for improving their reading comprehension. Some teaching implications of the findings are also addressed.

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“…Typical features of academic discourse are passivisation as a strategy to make a text more implicit, and nominalization to make a text more condensed (Biber -Gray, 2010). Complex noun phrases (CNPs) are also challenging for students, therefore, direct instruction is necessary to improve CNP comprehension (Priven, 2020). These linguistic features, and many more, can be captured visually by analysing concordance lines.…”

English Grammar Awareness Facilitates L2 Learners’ Writing

“…Additionally, L2 learners need to grasp the knowledge of parsing too. L2 learners have to be well guided with the skill, given that they will encounter with more complicated phrase such as complex noun phrase (CNP) and so forth throughout their academic studies -this CNP offers learners to see multiple layers of noun and its modifiers, lacking of phrases knowledge and fail to see how each word is parsed can result in confusion and uncertainty (Priven, 2020). The different concepts of phrases and clauses -noun, adverbial, adjectival, prepositional and verb phrases as well as noun, adverbial, and adjectival clauses -have to be at the writer's finger tips as the knowledge to arrange words in sentences (by exploiting all these phrases and clauses) assists the writers to find their own writing style.…”

Headlines in The Guardian editorials: the syntax and semantics of noun phrases

“…Researchers can follow a traditional semantic approach and focus on a specific issue, for example, determination in s-genitive constructions and noun+noun sequences (Koptjevskaja-Tamm, & Rosenbach, 2005) or interpretation of semantic relations among NP constituents (Moldovan, Badulescu, Tatu, Antohe, & Girju, 2004). The problem of complexity in NPs is viewed either from the semantic angle (Abdullah, & Frost, 2007) or in the academic written discourse (Priven, 2020). In our work, we apply the results of these studies to explore the possible ambiguity in The Guardian editorial headlines.…”