Semi-academic sources in EAP: an interview with a New Scientist journalist (2)

Part two: Language & vocabulary

My last post featured the first part of an interview with Dr Alison George, an editor for New Scientist magazine. She talked about how scientific papers are restructured and presented in a more appealing way for the more general, New Scientist readership. In this post, she talks about how the actual language used is different.

Dr Alison George: “A journalist will try to avoid the "jargon heavy" language used in scientific papers and adopt a simpler approach to conveying information.  A case in point is my PhD thesis, for which I gave the title:  "The biodegradation of anionic surfactants in the estuarine environment".  In hindsight, I realise that I went out of my way to use long words to make it sound serious.  This is typical of scientific papers. However, if I was explaining my thesis to a friend, I'd say that my research was about whether the chemicals found in shampoos and detergents are biodegradable.” 

I ask whether the use of long words in academic papers is really just about ‘sounding serious’ and on reflection, Alison admits, that isn’t always strictly true. “For example, to use "detergents" instead of "anionic surfactants" would have made it easier to understand for the lay person, but is technically inaccurate.”

Vocabulary differences: a specific case

To further illustrate her point about language differences, Alison gave me an example of an article she’d written for New Scientist about penguins and for comparison, the two academic papers on which it was based. 

She picks out a couple of phrases that were reworded to make them more accessible. “The first paper used the words "synoptic survey" in the opening sentence and title . The words "synoptic survey" would not be used in New Scientist, instead we might say, "a survey of the entire coastline of Antarctica using satellite images".  

The second paper uses terms such as "analysis of coupled demographic and climate models ". Again, we would avoid using this term in New Scientist because it's hard to work out what it means. Instead, we might say something like: "predictions of future numbers of Emperor penguins based on forecasts of the Antarctic climate".  

The bottom line is this: although a scientific research paper and an article in New Scientist might tackle the same topic, and both might deal with some tricky concepts, the style they are written in is different. In New Scientist, we make strenuous efforts to translate technical terminology and jargon into words that an educated reader, without any specialist knowledge of the subject, should understand.”

Lost vocabulary:

What exactly constitutes ‘technical terminology’ though? The two examples above are clearly very specialist and arguably not very useful for the average EAP student to spend time on, but what about the rest of the language? If we compare the New Scientist article with the first of the academic articles in terms of overall vocabulary, we see any interesting difference:

	New Scientist article	Original scientific paper
Top 2000 most frequent words	83%	74.5%
AWL* words	5%	14.5%
Other words	12%	11%

* Academic Word List

These stats are very broad-brush, but they do show that as well as cutting the most specialist terminology, the New Scientist article also loses a lot of the general academic vocabulary (here based on the AWL), which is probably exactly what EAP students do need. Just some of the vocabulary that gets lost in the edit here includes words like: assess, consistent, distribution, establish, evidence, factor, function, indicate, occur, variation; all recognizably useful core academic words.

If so many EAP materials focus on teaching this core academic vocabulary, it seems somewhat counterproductive to be using texts that quite consciously feature significantly less of it.

Idiom and hyperbole:

So what is it that replaces the academic vocabulary in the New Scientist article? Well, it does contain a higher proportion of high frequency words, which should make it more accessible to the average non-native speaker student. This is good news, of course, if you’re looking for input for a speaking lesson, say. However, there are a couple of linguistics features which could work against its usefulness in an EAP context.

Because New Scientist articles are essentially targeted at a native speaker readership, they draw on idiomatic language and cultural references to appeal to that audience. Take these two short extracts:

“Fast-forward a few decades, and many colonies will be on the road to extinction. Are we witnessing the last march of the emperor penguins?” (> tricky idioms in ‘fast-forward a few decades’ and ‘on the road to extinction’, plus the cultural reference to the documentary film ‘March of the Penguins’, which gets another mention later in the piece)

“This extraordinary lifestyle has made the emperors famous. They have even been held up as role models by evangelical Christians.” (> again, the cultural reference here might take quite a bit of explaining to students from some backgrounds!)

These type of issues might be a fun distraction in a General English class, but are they really an effective use of class time for students preparing for academic study? Again, I guess that’s down to context and the amount of class time available, as well as the interests and priorities of your students.

Perhaps of more concern, I think, for students trying to get to grips with an academic style of writing is the type of language used to give the story more impact for a general audience. The New Scientist article is littered with words like impossible, blockbuster, breath-taking, catastrophic, disastrous, extraordinary, demise and vanish.  This is exactly the type of language that academic writers are careful to avoid, unless it’s very carefully hedged (with seemingly, apparently, potentially, etc.) It comes back to the point Alison made above about the need to be completely accurate in academic writing. As EAP tutors, we warn our students to avoid exaggeration and overgeneralization in their writing, because we can foresee the comments which will come back from their subject tutors.

This raises the question of whether it’s actually misleading to present this type of text to students as an example of academic writing. How will they know just what’s appropriate to use in their own writing and what’s not? Yes, we can make mention of the differences, we can do a bit of genre analysis even, but will students be able to make all those distinctions for themselves, will they realize just what’s transferrable and what isn’t?

So having looked in a bit more detail at the genre, is it helpful to use articles from consumer magazines aimed at a general readership in an EAP context?  As Swales (2016) puts it: “Genres are defined in terms of their communicative purposes” and from what we’ve seen, the communicative purposes of these articles versus the kind of academic texts that students will need to read as part of their studies are clearly not the same. So, once again, I think, it comes back to the aims of the lesson; these articles are clearly more fun and engaging than most academic texts and because they’re aimed at a non-specialist audience, they’re more suited to a mixed-discipline EAP class. However, if the aim is to prepare students for the type of reading texts and language they’re going to need for their future studies, not only are these articles unhelpful, but they could actually prove a hindrance.

With special thanks to Alison George for taking the time to answer my questions, for being so enthusiastic about the topic and for providing some fascinating insights into the workings of New Scientist.

References:

Fretwell PT, LaRue MA, Morin P, Kooyman GL, Wienecke B, Ratcliffe N, et al. (2012) An Emperor Penguin Population Estimate: The First Global, Synoptic Survey of a Species from Space. PLoS ONE 7(4): e33751. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033751

George A (2012) The last march of the emperor penguins. New Scientist

Jenouvrier S, Holland M, Stroeve J, Barbraud J, Weimerskirch H, Caswell H (2012) Effects of climate change on an emperor penguin population: analysis of coupled demographic and climate model. Global Change Biology 18 (9), p.2756-2770
Swales J (2016) Genre & English for Academic Purposes video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W--C4AzvwiU&feature=youtu.be
 

Thinking about academic lexicons

Last weekend I was in Frankfurt for an EAP Day organized by OUP and ELTAF. The teachers were a mix of those already involved in EAP and those just interested to find out about it, but all were happy to join in and ask questions, even when I plunged them straight into EAP activities first thing on a Saturday morning!

One of the sessions was on EAP vocabulary and as I’ve done before, I started off by asking everyone to write a single word on a blank card that they thought of as typically academic.

In the workshop, I talked about the three categories of vocabulary needed by EAP students developing their own academic lexicon:

- general vocabulary: words in the top 2000 most frequent words in the language, but with a special focus on those apparently common words which have more specific academic uses (table, find, string, etc.)

- core academic vocabulary: as per the Academic Word List

- specialist vocabulary: especially terms used in specific academic disciplines

So how did the teacher’s intuitions about academic vocabulary match up to these different areas?

36% of the words chosen were Top 2000 words. Many clearly fitted into the category of words that are useful in an academic context and have slightly different everyday and academic senses, such as critical, examine and practice. Critical (and criticize and critique) came out as part of the discussion we had about subtly different academic uses. Notice the difference between these two definitions from a general learner’s dictionary (OALD) and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English:

OALD: critical adj: expressing disapproval of sb/sth and saying what you think is bad about them

OLDAE: critical adj: involving making fair, careful judgements about the good and bad qualities of sb/sth

Another 36% of the words chosen by teachers were on the Academic Word List, so solid core academic vocabulary, like significant, criteria, data, assessment and thesis.

The remaining 28% were words which don’t fall into either of the other two categories. Some of these – purport and construe – were clearly very formal and potentially academic in register (both appear in OLDAE), but just not frequent enough to make it onto the AWL. The others form an interesting little group which I may have to consider adding into my workshop next time I give it, and that’s what could be described as words that students won’t actually use in their academic writing, but need to talk about studying. So there were words like dissertation which are about academic study generally (you could add seminar, tutorial, deadline, extension, plagiarism, etc.) and also linguistic metalanguage, such as collocation – the essential terminology you need to talk about language learning (you could add register, hedging, clause, etc.)

To get to this breakdown, I used the Vocabulary Profiler on the Lextutor website, which picks out AWL words and classifies the remainder in terms of frequency. It’s a really useful (free) tool which I gave a demo of in the workshop. I know though that when I've shown it in the past, teachers have come back to me afterwards and said they couldn’t get it to do what I’d shown them. Because the website has so many different tools available, it can be a bit difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with it. The following link will take you straight to the AWL highlighter tool: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ I’ve also put together a short demo:

At the end of the session, I asked everyone to go back to their cards and to classify the word they’d noted down at the start into one of the three groups. 57% of people classified their words correctly, although to be fair, several others chose words which arguably ought to be on the AWL but aren’t!

Thanks to everyone who came for such an enjoyable and stimulating day, I hope you all went away with some food for thought.

 

Munich: no beer, but a bit of quickie research

My trip to Munich last weekend went well. The trip itself was fairly unremarkable, just standard, rather unglamorous business travel without much time to see the place I was visiting. And sadly, without enough time to visit the Oktoberfest, which is perhaps for the best as I’m not sure that a large amount of beer is advisable when you’ve got two hour-long presentations to deliver!

The event itself though, a whole day of talks on EAP organized by MELTA (the local English teachers’ association), was really good, with a really interesting and interested audience, and lots of lively chat in-between sessions. There was a very long day of back-to-back talks lined up, of which I was doing two, so I wanted to break things up with a bit of audience participation.

Photo by Vivienne Arnold

In my first session about EAP vocabulary, I was talking about three areas of vocabulary that students need to work on to develop their personal academic lexicon:

1 core academic vocabulary (as typified by the Academic Word List)

2 more frequent words (that don’t make it onto the AWL) which have specific academic senses and uses

3 specialist or discipline-specific vocabulary

So to kick off my session, I asked the audience to write down on a blank card just one piece of vocabulary that they thought of as prototypically academic and that they might choose if they could teach their students only one word that would help them most in improving their academic English.

I did it as a way of involving the audience in the topic, but I was also genuinely interested in getting some insight into their views and intuitions about academic vocabulary. After the talk, while another speaker was presenting, I very quickly typed the words from the cards into an AWLhighlighter to produce some rather rough and ready ‘results’ to present at the start of my next session. This is what came out:

40.81% top 2000 most frequent words

44.90% AWL / core academic vocabulary

14.29% off-list / “specialist”

according according advantage claim claim consider development effect however however is opinion propose prove purpose read studied towards argue discuss

analysis analyze analyze approach conclusion conclusion consequently controversial derivative emphasize focus function nevertheless perspective research research structure subsequently summarize thesis topic whereas

enthusiasm essay essay panacea paradox reference transcript

Interestingly, it quite nicely backed up my contention that, while useful, just focusing on traditional AWL vocabulary isn’t enough and that there’s a lot of apparently ‘frequent’ vocabulary that is also worth some focus in an EAP class, especially where the everyday and academic uses of a word, such as consider or argue, are quite different.

Photo by Vivienne Arnold

It also threw up some interesting anomalies, especially the fact that essay and reference, clearly two key words for EAP students were “off-list” (i.e. neither in the top 2000 nor on the AWL). There are explanations for this, but I think I’m going to save that discussion for another day and another blog post …

It was a fun bit of quickie research though and perhaps one that would be interesting to repeat with different groups of EAP teachers to find out how they view what academic vocabulary is all about. It was also a fun day and as ever, great to meet and chat to EAP teachers working in a different country and context. Thanks to everyone for making me feel so welcome!