About this activity
Twelve verbs turned into nouns with -tion: act and action, collect and collection, celebrate and celebration, inform and information, create and creation, invent and invention, subtract and subtraction, imagine and imagination. Nominalisation is the machinery of academic writing — the ability to turn an action into a thing you can talk about.
How to use it in a session
Give the verb and ask for the noun, then use both in a sentence. We celebrate and the celebration was long shows what the change is for, and that is more useful than the pair alone. Watch the spelling changes as you go: celebrate drops the e, imagine changes more than that, and subtract simply adds — three different behaviours in one set.
What to listen for
Listen for the stress moving. Celebrate and celebration put the stress in different places, as do inform and information, and a student who says CEL-e-bra-tion has the morphology and not the phonology. Watch imagination, the longest here, which changes the base considerably and is the one students most often cannot produce.
Carrying it home
Academic words in homework are full of these. Asking what verb is inside information or subtraction takes five seconds and makes a long word shorter — which is the point of morphology instruction in one sentence.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Third through sixth, as academic morphology work.
- Do I need to sign in?
- No, all twelve pairs play free.
- Why does nominalisation matter?
- Because it is how academic writing works. Turning an action into a noun lets a writer make it the subject of a sentence, and students who cannot do it write in a register that reads as much younger.