Averil Coxhead from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies developed and evaluated The Academic Word List (AWL) for her MA thesis. This list is a very useful resource for English for Academic Purposes teachers and learners.
The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families which were selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (the General Service List), thus making it specific to academic contexts. The AWL was primarily made so that it could be used by teachers as part of a programme preparing learners for tertiary level study or used by students working alone to learn the words most needed to study at colleges and universities.
The Academic Word List is a list of 570 words that appear frequently in all academic texts. This means that they are very general academic words. They are not specially connected with any particular subject and so they are very useful for all students.
The list was created by Averil Coxhead, who analysed hundreds of academic texts, from all subject areas, to see which words were common to all these texts. She then divided the 570 words into 10 lists (called sub-lists of the Academic Word List) according to how frequent they are. Sub-list 1 has the most frequent words, and sub-list 10 has the least frequent words. Each sub-list contains 60 words, except sub-list 10, which only has 30.
These words are common in academic texts, but they are not so common in everyday writing or speech. This is why they are not so easy to learn, but why at the same time, it is very important for students to learn them. If you do not know these words, you will find academic work at university difficult. If you learn these words well, so that you understand them and use them easily, you will find that studying becomes easier and you should be more successful in your studies.
Are there really only 570 words I have to know?
It is important to understand that the 570 words are in fact head-words - they are the most common words within a word family. This means that there may be many more related words that you will also need to understand and learn. Here is an example of a word family:
You can try learning some words from the list every day, but it is better to study the words in context, so that you understand how they are used. To quickly and easily identify words from the AWL in a text, use the AWL Highlighter. This program will show the academic words in bold. For example:
You can use the AWL Gapmaker to create tests for yourself. This program will replace words from the AWL with a gap. Try to fill the gaps, then check your work by using the highlighted text. In this way you can expand your core academic vocabulary.
To create the AWL, Coxhead first of all made a corpus i.e. a computerised collection, of over 400 written academic texts, equalling about 3.5 million words in total. Coxhead used a range of different types of texts: journal articles, www articles and university textbooks, covering 28 different subject areas from 4 disciplines: arts, commerce, law and science.
She counted how frequently and how widely different words were used. She then selected the core academic vocabulary. She included on the list only the words which appeared at least 100 times in the corpus as a whole and at least ten times in each of the four disciplines. A word that was found frequently in law texts but rarely in science texts, for example, was not included.
As a result, the 570 words on the Academic Word List are valuable for all students preparing for academic study, whether they are planning to follow a course in Medicine, Computer Systems Engineering, Architecture or European Law. If you are planning to continue your studies in English, this list will help you.
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a word list of 570 English words which appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The target readership is English as a second or foreign language students intending to enter English-medium higher education, and teachers of such students. The AWL was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and divided into ten sublists in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the General Service List (the 2000 highest-frequency words in general texts); however, many words in the AWL are general vocabulary rather than restricted to an academic domain, such as area, approach, create, similar, and occur in Sublist One.
Objective: This study aims at developing a list of academic and technical words commonly used in medical research articles. It is conducted in line with the specificity of academic literacy and vocabulary practices in every individual discipline. Methods: The corpus of this study consisted of 18,462,820 words extracted from 1,784 research articles accessed from three prestigious and widely known journals, i.e., The Lancet, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), published between 2015 and 2019. To analyze the data, the RANGE program as a robust tool for developing viable academic word lists was used. Results: Our quantitative and qualitative data analysis yielded a final academic wordlist which consisted of 1,003 words, covered 1,972,420 words in the corpus, and accounted for 10.68% of the medical research articles. Discussion: The high coverage of the extracted academic and technical words provides a reliable source for medical students, medical educators, material designers, and those who are deeply involved in medical English education.
Ziel: Diese Studie zielt darauf ab, eine Liste von akademischen und technischen Wörtern zu erstellen, die in medizinischen Forschungsartikeln häufig verwendet werden. Es wird im Einklang mit den Besonderheiten der akademischen Alphabetisierung und der Wortschatzpraxis in jeder einzelnen Disziplin durchgeführt.Methoden: Der Korpus dieser Studie bestand aus 18.462.820 Wörtern aus 1.784 Forschungsartikeln, auf die in drei renommierten und weithin bekannten Zeitschriften zugegriffen wurde, nämlich The Lancet, The British Medical Journal (BMJ) und The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), veröffentlicht zwischen 2015 und 2019. Zur Analyse der Daten wurde das RANGE-Programm als robustes Werkzeug zur Entwicklung tragfähiger akademischer Wortlisten verwendet.Ergebnisse: Unsere quantitative und qualitative Datenanalyse ergab eine endgültige akademische Wortliste, die aus 1.003 Wörtern bestand, 1.972.420 Wörter im Korpus abdeckte und 10,68% der medizinischen Forschungsartikel ausmachte.Diskussion: Die hohe Abdeckung der extrahierten akademischen und technischen Wörter bietet eine zuverlässige Quelle für Medizinstudenten, Medizinpädagogen, Materialdesigner und diejenigen, die sich intensiv mit der medizinischen Englischausbildung beschäftigen.
As per our recent blog, learners are best served by carefully selected word lists. In ReadingWise Vocab, teachers can select or design their own word lists and target them. The programme takes care of spaced learning and helps learners retain their growing vocabulary.
This image shows some of the existing word lists that teachers can allocate. Some are topic-specific; some develop vocabulary from books that are being read as a class; some are derived from specific tier 2 lists. If you are using the programme, you choose.
Teacher-allocated word lists have a pre and post quiz built in. This helps to gauge impact and progress. Note that, due to the large number of words, the background word list does not have a built in quiz.
This list features academic words that you may see or hear on the reading and/or listening sections of the TOEFL and IELTS tests. Becoming familiar with these and similar words will also help you on the writing and speaking portions of the tests.
The following terms are part of the academic language of science, yet are not specific to science. It is necessary to understand these terms if one is to read and understand science literature. For more information on academic language, click here.
The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead of Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. The list is divided into 10 sublists of word families and contains 570 words selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts.
Yet what are the key words that a college student needs for academic success in English? Professor Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand studied a wide range of academic texts across disciplines in the late 1990s. She culled 570 word families that she deemed vital for college preparation and created the Academic Word List. The list was further divided into 10 sub-lists, from the most frequent to the least frequent.
You can find the entire Academic Word List (AWL) in 10 subsections online. Additionally, I also recommend students familiarize themselves with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This remarkable reference site documents how English words and phrases actually appear in spoken and written English.
We use the list in Text Inspector to analyse academic use of language in texts. It can be used to help EFL students and teachers improve both their teaching and learning experience, and help researchers understand the number of academic words used.
We sat down with her for a virtual chat to discuss her love of vocabulary, how word lists like the AWL can transform language learning and why online gaming might not be so bad after all when it comes to language learning.
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