Developing Academic Skills via Greek and Latin Vocabulary Teaching

Abstract

Learning a foreign language by Russian science students can be enhanced by raising their awareness of the stock of words common for English and Russian that derived from Greek and Latin roots. One of the motivations for this research is the fact that Russian is an analytic language with many morphological and word-formation suffixes and endings which may help the learners better recognize and remember the words in English with similar Greek and Latin basis. Another motivation is that knowledge of Greek and Latin words in the native and target languages can help students understand the meaning of new words. The authors investigate the extent to which semantic transparency supports the students’ academic English vocabulary development. The elaborated experimental procedure aims at examining whether awareness of this similarity helps students to identify the specified words in writing samples. Finally, the authors describe the methodological framework with the focus on academic skills development in science students based on teaching Greek and Latin vocabulary. Our observations and empirical data have led us to believe that the designed training tasks based on the findings of the proposed action plan offer some remedies for the teaching process.