Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

Analysis of how students of English for Science and Engineering use certain categories of nouns in their technical writing projects revealed a significant use of "sub-technical" and "text-structuring" words serving both referential and discourse-oriented functions. The use of matching or cloze-type and open-ended writing exercises to improve…

The results of a study of chain compounds, heavily modified noun phrase structures, used in the language of three engineering journals are presented. The findings conlude that: chain compounds appear to be more common in American than British English; chain compounds can be classified in several groups according to their structure, the most common…