GEOLOGY AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF LANGUAGE VERSUS CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING

Students are expected to learn key vocabulary words in introductory geology courses in order to understand the language of geology. The purpose of this study is to determine if agreement exists among textbook authors on a common vocabulary for students in introductory physical geology courses. To establish a core list of terms, we analyzed the bolded words in 16 commonly used introductory physical geology textbooks. Within all 16 textbooks, nearly 3,400 bolded terms were counted, averaging 660 terms per textbook (ranging from 259 to 1,434 for individual books). We found a considerable number of minor variations in terms between different textbooks, mostly involving plural/singular words, (e.g. aftershock vs. aftershocks), spacing (e.g. rock slide vs. rockslide), hyphenation (e.g. P-wave vs. P wave), additional descriptions (e.g. anthracite vs. anthracite coal; plate tectonics vs. plate tectonic theory), and variations in spelling (e.g. fiord vs. fjord). We combined those terms that were similar into a single common term; however, terms that had the same meaning but were not similarly written (e.g. aquiclude and aquitard or composite volcano and stratovolcano) were not combined and considered as separate terms. After combining terms, the total number of terms in all 16 books was reduced to slightly more than 2,900. Only 30 terms (1% of the total) were common to all 16 textbooks. In addition, 85% of terms were common to less than half of the textbooks, and 34% of terms were listed in only one textbook. Although many of these represent important concepts, only a few are essential to understanding the language of geology. This diversity indicates that the textbook authors (and perhaps most geologists) have their own set of key terms, likely leading to difficulties for students to learn a common geologic language.