Nominalisation in high scoring primary and secondary persuasive texts

The presentation examines the extent to which nominalisation was used in persuasive texts by the highest scoring Tasmanian primary and secondary school students who completed the 2011 NAPLAN writing test. Specifically, it draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to consider how these students used different forms of nominalisation to persuade readers about the 2011 writing prompt: that too much money is being spent on toys and games. The findings showed that high scoring students used nominalisation occasionally and strategically to serve a range of rhetorical purposes, with the specific amount of nominalisation scaling up with each subsequent year level. More specifically, nominalisation appeared infrequently in the high scoring Year 3 texts, yet by Year 5 all high scoring students used this language resource, and this increased across the secondary years. This finding suggests that although nominalisation is explicitly introduced the Australian Curriculum: English in Year 8, it is possible that introducing promising young writers to nominalisation in the late primary and early secondary years would be an effective teaching strategy for persuasive writing. Waiting until nominalisation is formally introduced to all students in Year 8 may disadvantage some students when those who score most highly are already making this language choice in the primary years. While this study provides useful insight into the use of nominalisation by successful primary and secondary school writers in the controlled context of NAPLAN testing, further research is needed to see how young writers use nominalisation for persuasive purposes in more authentic contexts.