Academic Vocabulary

CC image by lisa31337 on Flickr

With new content comes new academic vocabulary. Some subjects seem to have academic vocabulary and academic language that is more complex than others. I’m finding that the academic language and vocabulary of statistics is hugely complicated, and its nuances and variations are frankly driving me crazy. My statistics textbook uses one set of academic vocabulary, the teacher uses another, and SPSS software uses another still. Combine that with esoteric definitions of statistical functions that seem contradictory, and the whole process feels like a rabbit hole that I can’t get out of.

Take, for example, the p value, which is computed using a t-test. The p value is also called the level of significance, and we want it to be as low as possible. A high level of significance means there is likely no significant difference between two tests. So essentially, a statistician wants a low level of significance in order to prove the significance of a comparison. To make things more interesting, when you conduct a t-test comparison in SPSS which is supposed to yield a p value, there is no p-value. There is a t value, which has nothing to do with the t in the t-test. There are 2 “sig” columns, but we aren’t currently worried about the one that goes with Levene's Test for Equality of Variances.

Even with a class glossary, 2 textbooks, and YouTube to help me make sense of things, I’m drowning in the new vocabulary. The base concepts themselves aren’t actually that complicated, but trying to read and write in the correct vocabulary is. There are concepts and comparisons I can draw, but I lose points in my descriptions because I use the wrong terms. On the plus side, I definitely have a much better gut-level understanding of what our English Language Learners are going through as they try to tackle complex vocabulary in the content areas.