Investigating complex noun–noun modification in academic prose

Understanding and using nominalized structures is a fundamental skill for advanced TESOL students, especially in academic settings. This lesson encourages students to experiment with the structure of the noun group in academic English with a special focus on its potential complexity (e.g. job satisfaction vs. community college faculty job satisfaction). This can be done by looking at how the noun group “can be expanded to a more or less indefinite extent” (Halliday, 1998, p. 196) by adding other nouns before (pre-modification) and after it (post-modification). Working with grammatical tags in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), students are encouraged to reason in terms of the mechanism whereby the idea expressed by a central noun can be specified and/or expanded.