I think it will not be wrong to say that few of us read scientific research reports.
To enjoy such a text, you have to understand the language. Academics are brilliant in using the most complicated words to explain the simplest things and they’re using the most complex sentence structures to practice it.
But speaking the academic language is interesting sometimes. A lot of scientists are publishing funny stories, they’re just written in code so only those will understand who know the language. But sharing is caring. And a few of them revealing the truth about their fails they’ve hidden under all of that confusing grammar.
According to California State University, Northridge, the academic language includes, for example, discipline-specific vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, and applications of rhetorical conventions and devices that are typical for a content area (e.
g., essays, lab reports, discussions of a controversial issue.) They agree that to become a master of it, it is necessary to learn objectives and should focus on language as well as on content. “Some language demands are related to text types, which have specific conventions with respect to format, expected content, tone, common grammatical structures (e.
g., if…, then…), etc. The language demands of other tasks are not as predictable and may vary depending on the situation,” they write.
The California State University, Northridge says there’s no one way to understand about it.
“For text types, it is important to make the conventions explicit, often providing graphic organizers when students are first learning how to produce the text type,” they write. “For less predictable language tasks, students need to understand the nature of the task and the range of possible responses and associated language.
When students are just learning to use a particular form of academic language, they will need more scaffolding and support. For example, an English teacher trying to develop students’ abilities to follow up on a student comment might invite students to brainstorm different types of responses (e.
g., agreement with elaboration, agreement with qualification, disagreement) together with some typical sentence starters or grammatical structures for each type of response.”
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