From Verbs to Nouns: Nominalization in Academic Writing

About This Resource

A complete Grade 10 ESL writing pack on nominalization, the academic habit of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns (decide → decision, important → importance). Students learn common suffixes, compare spoken and academic versions of the same idea, transform sentences and use noun phrases to write concise topic sentences. Includes slides, a lesson plan, worksheet, quiz, homework, A5 flashcards, a rubric, Word files and answer keys.

Overview

Spoken English tells stories with verbs: Prices rose quickly, so people bought less. Academic writing often packs the same idea into noun phrases: The rapid rise in prices led to a fall in spending. This is nominalization. It makes writing more concise and formal and lets writers put an idea at the start of a sentence as its subject. Students learn suffixes such as -tion, -ment, -ance, -ity and -ness, compare spoken and written versions, transform sentences and practice using nominalization in moderation, because too much can make writing hard to read.

Resource Details

Subject: ESL
Topic: Nominalization in Academic Writing
Category: Writing
File Type: PDF
File Size: 342.7 KB
Published: 14 Nov 2026
Downloads: 0

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Grade 10 ESL (ages 15–16), B1–B2 55 minutes Academic writing vocabulary sentence transformation

Learning Objectives

Form nouns from verbs and adjectives using common suffixes.
Rewrite spoken-style sentences in a more academic style using nominalization.
Judge when nominalization helps and when it makes writing unclear.

How to Use This Resource

Write two sentences on the board: one spoken, one academic. Ask: "Which one sounds like a textbook? Why?"
Teach the suffixes and the transformation steps with the slides, then do activities 1 and 2 together.
Students complete activities 3 to 5. Use the quiz and send the homework page home.

Classroom Activity Ideas

Suffix sort race: teams sort verbs and adjectives by the suffix their noun takes.
Textbook detective: students find nominalizations in a science or history textbook page.
Too much? Groups untangle an over-nominalized sentence into clear English.

Differentiation

Support: give a suffix table and let students use dictionaries to check noun forms. Challenge: students rewrite a paragraph from a history textbook in spoken style and then back, discussing what is gained and lost.

Assessment

Use the worksheet and quiz to check word forms and transformations. Use the rubric for the sentences students write in activity 5.

Teacher Tips

Stress balance: nominalization is a tool, not a goal. The investigation of the analysis of the data is worse than We analyzed the data. Show that nominalization often needs a new verb (led to, resulted in, caused) to connect the noun phrases.

What's Included

11-page printable PDF lesson pack: teacher lesson plan with timings, materials and differentiation
Key vocabulary list (6 words with meanings and examples)
Student worksheet (5 activities)
Quiz / assessment (3 parts)
Homework practice page
Printable flashcards: 6 A5 picture cards (separate PDF)
Assessment rubric (4 levels)
Lesson slides (editable PowerPoint)
Editable Word version of all student pages
Complete answer key (also as a separate PDF)

Additional Files

Lesson Slides (PPTX)
Editable Student Pages and Lesson Plan (DOCX)
A5 Flashcards (PDF)
Answer Key (PDF)

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