The Academic Word List (AWL) is a

word list A word list (or ''lexicon'') is a list of a language's lexicon (generally sorted by frequency of occurrence either by levels or as a ranked list) within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. A lexicon sorted by ...

of 570

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

words which appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The target readership is

English as a second or foreign language English as a second or foreign language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Language education for people learning English may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL ...

students intending to enter English-medium

higher education Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after comple ...

, 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 Victoria University of Wellington ( mi, Te Herenga Waka) is a university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University of New Zealand. The university is well kno ...

, New Zealand, and divided into ten sublists in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the ''

General Service List The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was E ...

'' (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. The

list A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...

is available on the Simple English Wiktionary.

References

# Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 213-238 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3587951 # Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (June 2007). Is there an "Academic Vocabulary"? TESOL Quarterly, Volume 41, Number 2, pp. 235-253. # Hancioglu, N., Neufeld, S., & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into the land of lexico-grammar. English for Specific Purposes 27/4, 459-479

External links

Academic VocabularyLevels tests online
Lexis (linguistics) Lists of English words {{ling-stub

See also

References

External links