English for Science, Space and the Environment — The Words Behind the Headlines

This is the English of anything you'd watch a documentary about, and it shows up in far more places than "science" suggests: news, exam essays, a podcast, an argument about recycling, the article a colleague sends you.

It's also unusually learnable, because it's built from a small number of repeating word-parts and one grammar habit that nothing else teaches.

The habit: saying how sure you are

This is the real skill, and almost nothing else in English uses it as heavily. Scientific and journalistic English grades its confidence very precisely, and reading the grade is how you tell a finding from a guess.

Compare:

• Dogs understand human emotion.
• There's growing evidence that dogs respond to human emotional cues.

The second is what a careful source says, and learning to produce it is what makes writing sound educated rather than merely correct. It's also, incidentally, what exam markers reward. Can Dogs Read Your Feelings? is built on exactly this kind of science writing at A2–B1, where the hedging first becomes necessary.

Climate and environment

The vocabulary that runs through every report:

Useful verbs: to cut, reduce, phase out, scale up, roll out, tackle, mitigate, adapt to.

And the collocations, which matter more than the individual words: tackle climate change, cut emissions, phase out coal, raise awareness, a carbon-neutral economy, extreme weather events.

"Greenwashing" is worth learning properly — it's recent, common, and there's often no direct equivalent in other languages. The Environment & Climate Change covers this whole field at B1.

Space

"Light-year" is the classic trap — it sounds like a period of time and is a measure of distance. Getting it wrong in an essay is a very visible mistake.

Two courses live here: Chasing the Shadow: The 2026 Total Solar Eclipse at B2–C1, and Project Hail Mary: English from Space, which takes the vocabulary through a story rather than a glossary.

Word-parts that unlock hundreds of words

This is the highest-value thing on the page. Scientific English is largely assembled from Greek and Latin pieces, so learning about fifteen of them lets you decode words you've never met.

Meet deforestation for the first time and you don't need a dictionary: de- (remove) + forest + -ation (a process). Most of this vocabulary is like that, and most learners never notice.

Talking about data

For essays, presentations and exams:

• The figure rose sharply between 2010 and 2020.
• Emissions have fallen by around twelve per cent.
• There's been a steady decline since…
• The trend has levelled off.
• Roughly a third of respondents said…
• Correlation isn't causation — the two things happen together, but…

Direction verbs: rise, fall, increase, decrease, peak, plateau, level off, fluctuate. Adverbs: sharply, steadily, slightly, dramatically, gradually.

Why this vocabulary is worth the effort

Even if you never discuss science, this register is where formal written English lives. The hedging, the word-parts, the data language — they're what separates a B2 essay from a C1 one, and they're what makes news in English readable without stopping every second sentence.

Common questions

Why does scientific English use so many hedging phrases?

Because it grades how certain a claim is. "The evidence suggests" and "it is established that" mean different things, and reading that difference is how you tell a finding from a guess. Producing it is also what makes writing sound educated rather than merely correct.

What does "net zero" actually mean?

Emitting no more greenhouse gas than you remove from the atmosphere — not emitting nothing. "Carbon neutral" is used similarly. "Offsetting" is compensating for your emissions by paying for reductions elsewhere.

Is a light-year a measure of time?

No — it's a distance: how far light travels in a year. It's one of the most common mistakes in science writing by learners, and a very visible one in an essay.

What's the fastest way to learn science vocabulary in English?

Learn the word-parts rather than the words. About fifteen prefixes and suffixes — bio-, geo-, hydro-, thermo-, photo-, -logy, -meter, de-, re-, -able — let you decode hundreds of terms you've never seen. "Deforestation" needs no dictionary once you know "de-" means remove.

What does greenwashing mean?

Presenting a company or product as environmentally responsible when it isn't — marketing rather than substance. It's a recent term with no direct equivalent in many languages, and it appears constantly in climate coverage.

Where to start

The Environment & Climate Change is the B1 course on the vocabulary you'll meet most often, and the natural place to begin.

For space, Chasing the Shadow: The 2026 Total Solar Eclipse works at B2–C1 and Project Hail Mary: English from Space teaches the same register through a story. If you want a gentler entry into science writing, Can Dogs Read Your Feelings? covers real research at A2–B1, hedging included.