When Verbs Become Nouns: Grammatical Metaphor in Students’ Academic Texts

The major challenge, according to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), for students in writing courses is the frequent use of grammatical metaphor in academic texts. Grammatical metaphor is the key element of academic discourse and a “single most distinctive characteristic” (Halliday, 2004) of written language compared to spoken language. This study focuses on the use of grammatical metaphors in students’ abstracts. Using content analysis, 20 students’ thesis abstracts were examined. The findings show that the use of grammatical metaphors is not yet optimal due to students’ lack of understanding of their functions in written English. The conclusion highlights the need for improvement in students’ use of grammatical metaphors.