Czech instrumentals as shell nouns in L2 pedagogy

Abstract

Using shell nouns is to facilitate efficiency by avoiding the repetition of long stretches of text (Kolhatkar & Hirst, 2014: 499), and to organize discourse in maintaining its coherence (Schmid, 2000; Flowerdew, 2003a). Identifying such coherence can be helpful for language users and learners in effectively expressing themselves, summarizing text, and retrieving information (Flowerdew, 2003b; Hinkel, 2004). According to Lin (2023), the instrumental case-marking is regarded as a Czech language-specific strategy for the use of shell nouns. As the field of language teaching and learning particularly focuses on the importance of using shell nouns (Schmid, 2018: 123), this study analyzes and discusses Czech shell nouns from the perspective of second language pedagogy. The aim is to investigate how Czech instrumentals are used as shell nouns in L2 data, based on learner corpora from CzeSL-SGT and LCSL. The results show that Czech instrumentals are used less frequently on average in learner corpora than in L1 data. In addition, there are very limited construction patterns of shell nouns used by these learners, and the average distribution of shell noun instrumentals is low. At the end of this study, specific pedagogy strategies derived from the discussion are presented, followed by proposed didactic instructions with a focus on the L1 Chinese learners. To sum up, from the perspective of L2 pedagogy, this study highlights that the appropriate use of Czech instrumentals as shell nouns can enhance Czech writing performance in text organization, as well as reading ability in information tracing and text summarization for learners of Czech.