Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition

ness Academic language is also typically more abstract than everyday conversation. A math text, for example, might contain abstract nouns such as length, width, circumference, addition, and subtraction. A biology text might contain abstract nouns for processes, such as respiration or mitosis. Putting These Together What we want to stress here is that these six facts about academic language are not six separate facts; they are all functionally related. Academic language 94 Reading Research Quarterly 47(1) achieves informational density by packing more propositions, and more content words, into a clause, which is typically achieved through the process of nominalization. Nominalization requires not only adding suffixes to adjectives or verbs to form nouns but also increased use of prepositional phrases and attributive nouns and adjectives. Consider the two following sentences: 1. Just because people who read more can read better doesn’t mean that if you read more this will make you