Abstract

This paper reports the study of the use of language in scientific text. Some linguists argue that scientific text is difficult to read and to understand. Sometimes it demotivates students to read the text. A significant problem appears, enquiring the phenomena of using scientific text among under graduate students. This research was carried out among some Polytechnic students, majoring in engineering. In this study, qualitative approach was utilised even though some numerical data were also used. For the sake of triangulation the data were resulted by conducting an English test and interviewing some participants. The test, using a scientific reading text, was intended to see their understanding of nominalisation, since it characterises scientific text. The data were analysed using the framework of nominalysing metaphor. The findings reveal that their understanding was at the moderate level. In other words, it was a bit above the average. This study concludes that this level of understanding nominalisations is not high enough for undergraduate students to understand the text. That is why they meet some difficulties when reading scientific texts. This recommends that grammatical competence with the topic of nominalisation be given to Polytechnic students by practising an explicit teaching in English program.

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