Academic words

1. Academic words.

Academic words are those words that commonly occur in academic text; that is, texts that are about commercial, scientific, legal or cultural topics. They do not have a high frequency normally (they are in the 2,000 to 3,000 frequency band), but they are worth paying attention to if you want to learn to read and write academic English.

Here is a paragraph from a text about theories of the origins of the stone statues, or moai, on Easter Island. The academic words are highlighted:

Many theories have been proposed as to the origins of the moai. Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki expedition attempted to prove that visitors from South America’s Inca empire were responsible. Others have argued that the statues were constructed by extra-terrestrials who were stranded on Easter Island and later rescued. Now, based on evidence from the oral traditions of the islanders and on experiments using different transport methods, a clearer idea is emerging of how this amazing engineering feat was achieved.

Here is the next paragraph of the text. Can you put the academic words in their correct place?

2. More academic words.

Here is a complete list of all the academic words in the full text:

achieve distinctive evidence method theory collapse emerge final obvious tradition consequence enormous identify parallel transport construct environment investigator recover contemporary erosion isolation significance

Choose words from the list to complete these sentences. You may have to change the form of the word slightly (for example, from singular to plural or from present to past).

3. Word families.

Most academic words belong to a word family. That is, they form a set of words that have the same root. For example:

significance  (abstract noun)
significant    (adjective)
signify         (verb)
insignificant (negative adjective)
significantly (adverb)

Can you complete this table for these other academic words?

abstract noun verb adjective negative adjective adverb