Abstract
Classical elements permeate global academic discourse and scientific terminology. Understanding the meanings and functioning of these elements can help multilingual scholars cope with disciplinary literature and write for publication and is therefore essential in teaching English for academic and specific purposes. However, few manuals on academic vocabulary explore word-formation in-depth or use it as a tool to alleviate learning through analysis and synthesis rather than memorizing words. Russian, as many other European languages, is a synthetic language in which affixation is as productive as in Latin. The paper presents a well-designed and approbated course of academic vocabulary for social scientists, analyses relationships between linguistic studies and teaching academic vocabulary, and discusses the ways of increasing the effectiveness and clarity of teaching by more systematic study of classical elements, enhancing students’ analytical skills through innovative methodology and using the advantages of similarities between Russian and Latin word-formation. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the key features of the course, such as interactive computer-based visual materials and various analytical tasks involving students’ background knowledge and academic awareness, help students not only decipher unknown words, but also produce neologisms, which is essential in coping with new terminology. Published as a book, Academic Vocabulary for Social Sciences is now available for teachers, students and researchers as a resource for study and self-study. The effectiveness of the approach demonstrates that it can be used as a model to design similar specific vocabulary courses for students of other synthetic languages.
Highlights
English is commonly accepted today as the lingua franca of scientific and academic communication; it has a relatively short history
The issues of linguistic theory concerning modern English word-formation are inseparable from the functioning of the language in today’s global academic communication
Scientific terminology and the lexis used in scholarly publications, which are mainly written in English, traditionally contain more Latin and Greek elements than spoken English
Summary
English is commonly accepted today as the lingua franca of scientific and academic communication; it has a relatively short history. Occurrence in dictionaries is not always the proper method in linguistics to judge the semantics of word-formation Another common drawback is that Russian authors include Greek elements or lexemes with non-grammatical meaning into their lists of prefixes, e.g. dys-, meta- [24, p. They “help students improve their mastery of the English language and acquire the keys for understanding thousands of words by studying Greek and Latin word parts (prefixes, root words, and suffixes)” [18]. The SAT preparation includes testing academic vocabulary skills: that is the area where young native speakers of English get at a loss because of the prevalence of Latin and Greek elements and uncommon word-formation with difficult to spell and pronounce complicated lexical structures. The interactive slides are found on the Publishers’ website and the author’s personal website
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