An Investigation of Nominalization and Lexical Density in Undergraduate Research Proposals

Abstract

Academic writing is considered an essential skill for academic success not only for undergraduate study but also for students’ further education and professional development. This writing genre has certain characteristics often lacking in students’ research writing. This study explores two characteristics in students’ research proposals, nominalization and lexical density (LD), after the students completed courses on academic writing and Second Language Research (SLR) in their second year at a Vietnamese pedagogical university. It also investigates the effectiveness of writing training in increasing students’ performance regarding the use of given features. The findings, obtained from analyzing students’ proposals and recorded interviews, suggest that students lacked awareness regarding features of academic writing and not much attention had been paid to linguistic aspects, though explicitly taught, when writing the proposals. The implications of this study will be relevant to academic writing teachers and course designers, as well as language teaching researchers.