Fatemeh Nasezade

Noun-to-Verb Ratio across Persian EFL learnersʹ and English Native Speakersʹ Written Academic Corpora

Academic writing has received significant attention in recent years. Effectively, experts, scholars, and students, whether native speakers of English or non-native speakers of English, need to write academically in any related field of study. Furthermore, researchers have stated that written discourse is more elaborated in contrast to spoken discourse, and spoken grammar contains longer, embedded, and more complex clauses or T-Units than spoken grammar and spoken grammar has shorter clauses. Recently, researchers have found that written discourse includes more complex phrases rather than clauses, and phrasal embedded structures have been a reason for the complexity of academic writing. Additionally, nominal phrases and noun phrases are frequent in English academic writing. This study is an attempt to investigate the noun-verb ratio of Persian EFL learners’ academic writings and compare the ratio of their writings to the ratio of native speakers’ academic writing. Essentially, this study aims to shed light on how Persian EFL learners use noun phrases in their academic discourse and whether they have already acquired using embedded noun phrases more than verb phrases in the academic proses or they need instruction in terms of using noun phrases. This study is a corpus-based cross-sectional study that consists of two corpora named learner corpora and criterion corpora. Two corpora constitute 1064 nationally and internationally published academic research papers. Learner corpora includes 568 nationally published research articles in the four disciplines. Criterion corpus comprises 496 research articles that were published in prestigious international journals within four disciplines. Social sciences, basic sciences, engineering, and medical sciences are four disciplines of the study. The result has revealed that mean of noun-verb ratio of learner corpora (10.1673) is much higher than the mean of the noun-verb ratio of criterion corpora (6.4414). Regarding the result of the study, it can be concluded that Persian EFL learners have acquired the nominal, complex, and embedded structures of the written academic discourse. The result was consistent with the previous studies of noun phrases complexity in academic writing. In effect, Persian EFL learners used much more noun phrases in their academic proses compare to English native speakers’ academic writings. Subsequently, Persian EFL learners’ writings comprised significantly complex and embedded structures. One possible reason for the using significant embedded noun phrases can be attributed to overgeneralization. In other words, the acquisition has occurred, but Persian EFL learners overgeneralized the use of complex and embedded noun phrases. As for the implication of the study, theoretically, this research shed light on the performance of Persian EFL learners in terms of nominal and complex noun phrases and noun-verb ratios within their academic writings. Pedagogically, the instructors and the teachers should take into consideration to help and instruct the learners to balance using the complex and embedded nominal phrases in their academic proses.