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LangLit 
An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal
 
 
Vol. 1 Issue - 1
 
 
81
 
 
 
Aug, 2014 
teachers can easily arrange crossword puzzles for their students with the words they want 
them to revise.
There is a long list of medical abbreviations which are routinely used by medical staff 
and the students are expected to know them, especially if they plan to have a hospital practice 
in Great Britain. An exercise that combines the teaching of medical collocations and medical 
abbreviations is the one in which the students are to match the parts of lexical collocations 
accompanied by their abbreviations, e.g., 
chest
 
 
therapy (HRT) 
ear, nose 
 
 
thrombosis (DVT)
hormone replacement
X-ray (CXR)
deep vein 
 
 
and throat (ENT) 
 
A distinctive feature of academic style is using the more formal alternative when 
choosing a verb, noun, or other part of speech. The choice is between a prepositional phrase 
(verb + preposition) and a single verb. In everyday spoken English, the verb + preposition is 
frequently used; however, in academic discourse the preferred choice is a single verb 
(wherever possible) (Swales and Feak, 1994/2004). Students should be aware of these 
stylistic differences between informal and formal language. 
An exercise in which students choose a verb which increases the formality of 
sentences to substitute for a verb + preposition is an effective way of raising the students’ 
awareness of the features of academic style, e.g., 
Researchers are looking into the way bacterial strains respond to the new drug. (informal 
style) 
Researchers are investigating the way bacterial strains respond to the new drug. (academic 
style) 
Mortality rate due to lung cancer has gone up in the last ten years. (informal style) 
Mortality rate due to lung cancer has increased in the last ten years. (academic style) 
It should be pointed out to the students that it is common in English academic texts to 
use nouns which are stacked together with other nouns and adjectives to form relatively long 
sequences (noun phrases), e.g., a breast cancer surgery, an autoimmune disease research 
centre, a randomized double-blind controlled trial, a movable pea-size tumour mass. The 
students should be explained that the head of such a sequence is the last noun and that they 
are translated into Polish in a right-to-left order, that is, starting from the head and moving to 
the left.
A useful activity which helps to infer the meaning of such sequences is asking the 
students to underline them in the text, circle the head of the sequence, and fill in the grid by 
writing its elements in a proper column, e.g.,