If you are a budding scientist wanting to get into an international university, you should ensure your language skills are up to scratch with an EC English Language Schools. Whilst historically, scientists customarily communicated in Latin with the goal of science to be to share findings, this practice died out in the 19th century and work was then published in English, French and German in line with the major scientists of the times.
We are all familiar with the coloured chart – The Periodic Table – displayed in classrooms and labs, the full history of it is a fascinating journey through scientific discovery and innovation is characterised by the collaborative and cumulative efforts of various scientists.
In the late 18th century, Lavoisier compiled a list of the known elements of that time and John Newlands proposed the Law of Octaves in 1864, suggesting that elements could be classified into groups based on similarities every eighth element. At the tail end of the 1800s, Dmitri Mendeleev created what we know to be the Periodic table with 63 elements in it, categorising them based on atomic mass, which also displayed periodic trends in their properties. Crucially, he left spaces for elements that were not yet discovered, predicting their properties with remarkable accuracy; indeed today, there are over 100 elements listed, including some lab made ones.
The consistency in symbols and overall structure makes the periodic table a universally accessible tool in science, transcending language barriers. This universality is a testament to the collaborative nature of scientific discovery and the global nature of the scientific community and the importance of using a common language to communicate in.
To study science today, English is the predominant language, followed by German with the top-ranking countries for study being USA, China, UK and Germany. A knowledge of Latin is also useful as many terms are derived from the language.
Being able to read papers, follow lectures and listen to podcast discussions are all valuable skills and requires a C1 level of English which is a globally recognised by educational establishments and governments for entry and immigration purposes.
With a guaranteed progression of 8 weeks per level at any of our schools, you can go from zero to hero in a year. We test you on application to see which level you should be placed in and test you along the way and at the end of your course so you can see your progress and work on any sticky areas along the way.
EC has 24 centres around the world in English speaking countries, so you are fully immersed in using the skill in various scenarios, meeting people from all across the globe and hopefully making your own (perhaps non-scientific) discoveries while on your exchange programme too! It’s not rocket science what you need to do next…