In Sections I and II of this book, we considered general issues regarding

reference;
it
is produced outside the presence of a relatively unspecified 
reader. . .
Spoken language
tends. . .

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98 Teaching and assessing EAP
the way in which text is created through lexical and grammatical ties 
which connect one part of the text to another in meaning (Halliday & 
Hasan, 1976).
Many EAP materials provide guidance and practice on cohesive ties, 
but the teaching of conjunction (however, as a result) is often given more 
weight than other options, leading to a situation in which students attempt 
to use conjunctive ties as a substitute for adequate management of theme 
and information structure. This approach leads to texts that have a sort of 
spurious surface cohesion but are fundamentally not coherent, as seen in the 
student example below, where at the same time does not succeed in estab-
lishing cohesion between the sentences.
Stone is one of the most widely applicable materials in building. 
At the 
same time stone decay has become a commonly used term in scientific 
journals (Viles, 1994).
Thematic choice, information structure and cohesion, then, are important 
aspects of discourse that students need to be able to handle if they are to 
produce effective academic texts. As shown in the example, problems in this 
area can lead to texts that are difficult to follow or where readers cannot 
distinguish the point that the writer is trying to make.
Noun phrases and nominalization
A high use of noun phrases is a key characteristic of written academic dis-
course, as shown by Biber and Gray (2010), who find that academic writing 
is predominantly constructed around the use of nouns, while conversation 
tends to privilege verbs. In particular, academic writing is characterized by 
its use of noun phrases, which are often premodified by adjectives (eco-
nomic weakness) and nouns (an absorption spectrometer) and/or postmodi-
fied by prepositional phrases (areas of concern).
One effect of this nominal/phrasal style is to make the text structurally 
compressed; but while concision is highly prized in academic writing, a 
very compressed text is likely to be more difficult for students to read and 
write. In the following example, we can see a typically complex noun phrase 
(in bold) and contrast it with its much lengthier and rather clumsy clausal 
equivalent.