The Realisation of Nominalisations in Students’ Texts

Abstract

The present study portrays the realisation of nominalisations in undergraduate students’ written texts. Nominalisation, as one of grammatical metaphors, is defined as the formation of nouns which derive from verbs or adjectives. It is asserted as one of the essential features of academic writing (Hyland, 2004) which even dominates the language of science (Halliday & Martin, 2005). Based on these statements, a research question arises, inquiring about the phenomena of applying nominalisations in students’ texts. This qualitative study was carried out among Polytechnic students majoring in mechanical engineering. The data, resulted by conducting an essay test, are in the forms of texts. This test examined nominalisations applied in students’ texts. To triangulate the data, an interview with some participants was also conducted. After the data were analysed by implementing the framework of nominalising metaphor, proposed by Halliday, three findings resulted. First, the students used ‘default’ nominalisations, the ones they usually found in their engineering textbooks. Second, nominalisation suffixes -ment and -t/sion mostly occurred in their texts. Third, in average, they realised four nominalisations in their written texts. The last finding is relevant with the result of a previous study of the same topic that the students’ level of understanding nominalisations is moderate, not very high. This concludes that the students’ ability to use nominalisations in written texts is still low. With their low ability, they could not realise nominalisations correctly. It recommends that for Polytechnic students, the ability of realising nominalisations be improved because nominalisations characterise the language of science.