tailieunhanh - Teaching academic ESL writing part 9

The teaching of rhetorical and discourse properties of academic writing in English can be made far more effective and efficient | 68 CHAPTER 4 Once the noun phrase is replaced with a pronoun subject-verb agreement is relatively easy to check. An important step in locating the subject noun phrase is to find the verb and then go to the left to look for the subject noun. The Basic Sentence1 Sentence Slots Adverb prepositional phrase Optional Subject noun phrase Predicate verb phrase Object noun phrase In the evening Every day They Sluents Group members study intransitive optional object review transitive object required class materials Building on this core structure it is possible to construct more complicated sentences that adhere largely to the same order of elements. It is important to note that this approach to sentence structure analysis is highly flexible in its ability to account for practically any number of syntactic and contextual variations even though the core sentence elements remain rigid in their order relative to one another. The third principle of the unit organization in a sentence specifies that sentence elements are organized according to a hierarchy based on their importance for a sentence to be grammatical . each sentence must have the most important elements such as the subject and the verb and in most cases an object or a subject complement . Other elements such as adverbs or prepositional phrases are mobile and can occur in various predictable locations. For example the next sentence includes several units prepositional phrases that are added to the core structure two following the subject noun phrase and one at the end of the sentence. A Sentence With Prepositional Phrases Subject Noun Phrase rIwo prepositional phrases that describe the subject Predicate Verb Phrase Object Noun Phrase Adverb prepositional phrase Interaction among people from different oiganizations develops social patterns among those organizations Example from Charon 1999. p. 131 2 Shaded slots in the tables are for optional elements in a sentence. TLFeBOOK SENTENCES PHRASES AND TEXT CONSTRUCTION .