Abstract
By Tamzen Armer
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011
128 pp plus CD, Price £19.90
ISBN: 978-0-521-15409-3
This book not only covers the scientific use of the English language but also advises students on issues such as how to write an introduction and how to behave at a congress. It is divided in 10 units, each covering a different scientific situation, e.g. writing, presenting or describing an experiment. As a reader, you are stimulated to listen (an audio CD is included), talk, read and write in English. The book is full of exercises, for which the answers can be found at the end, where you can also find the audio scripts of the listening exercises, a glossary and additional material. As there is so much information at different places in the book, I could not see the wood for the trees. This makes it hard to look up specific information quickly. Although clearly divided into units, the book seems cluttered, probably because the units consist entirely of exercises, without additional text which would help to guide the reader through.
Starting with unit 1, I felt that I was back at secondary school again. The exercises are rather simple. The aim of the book is to ‘improve professional communication skills, whether you are a professional or a student scientific researcher’. In one of the exercises, you have to connect words like ‘an academic journal’, ‘newspaper’ and ‘a conference’ with pictures of these communication media. In another exercise, you have to put the ‘author's name’, ‘title of the article’, ‘journal name’ etc. in the correct order for a citation. My opinion is that these exercises are too basic for professionals, even for student scientific researchers. The exercises may be more suitable for college students, although I doubt whether even they will find some of the exercises challenging enough. As a scientist, this book would probably only help you if your English language skills are poor and you have previously been entirely laboratory-based. After working through the text, I did find some useful exercises for the professional, but these are not easy to find at a glance, which limits the user-friendliness of the book.
Although the exterior of the book looks promising, I would not recommend it to professionals or student scientific researchers, although it might be useful for a novice in science with little knowledge of the English language.