A Course in Basic Scientific English [antikvár]

Introduction Purpose Nature of the linguistic material presented Grading and flexibility PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE COURSE The purpose of this course, as its title indicates, is to teach students of scientific subjects (including medicine, engineering and agriculture) the basic language of scientific English. This basic language is made up of sentence patterns, structural (functional) words and non-structural vocabulary which are common to all scientific disciplines and form the essential framework upon which the special vocabulary of each discipline is superimposed. Once this basic language has been mastered— together with the principal word-building devices (prefixes and suffixes) also presented in this book—the acquisition of these special vocabiilaries presents very little difficulty, since they are mainly international words and therefore very similar to those already used in the student's own language. The material incorporated in the course has been selected, for the most part on a frequency basis, from the scrutiny of more than three million words of modem scientific English of both American and British origin.^ This sample covered ten broad areas of science and technology (physics, chemistry, biology, geology and geomorphology, medicine, engineering, sociology, economics, psychology and agriculmre) and represented the types of literature likely to be consulted by students or graduates of science—university textbooks, professional papers and articles, scientific dictionaries and semi-popularizations. Whilst the principal criteria for the inclusion of items were frequency and range, a certain amount of material was selected for other reasons, e.g. because of their usefulness as describers or definers, because they were members of a group or set, or because, though not unduly frequent, they were essential or non-substimtable (as is the case with the Present Continuous tense, for example).^ Although it is assumed that smdents using this course have already received a certain amoimt of training in English at school or in a language institute, the material included has, in its presentation, been graded in length and complexity. Hence the most frequently used and simple structures have been introduced first, the whole of the corresponding Unit being written as far as possible exclusively in terms of the structure being presented (thus, for example, all the verbs appearing in Unit i are in the Present Simple Tense, which is the main structure in this unit). The length of the reading passages—and therefore of the amount of material they contain—increases progressively, from about 450 words in the early vmits to nearly three times ' It should be stated that, as far as scientific English is concerned, no significant difference was found between these two varieties of English. The few minor points of variance occurring in the course itself are explained. " Further details are given in English Language Teaching, Vol. XXI, No. 3. I vi' i'l'/ ',1-1. V I,