The Academic Word List (AWL) is a
word list of 570
English word families 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
Tertiary education (higher education, or post-secondary education) is the educational level following the completion of secondary education.
The World Bank defines tertiary education as including universities, colleges, and vocational schools ...
, 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. This list replaced the previously widely used ''
University Word List'', developed by Xue and Nation in 1986. The words included in the AWL were selected based on their range (breadth of academic areas covered), frequency, and dispersion (uniformity of frequency), and were divided into ten sublists, each containing 1000 words in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the ''
General Service List'' (the 2000 highest-frequency words in general texts). Many words in the AWL are general vocabulary not restricted to an academic domain, such as the words ''area'', ''approach'', ''create'', ''similar'', and ''occur,'' found in Sublist One, and the AWL only accounts for a small percentage of the actual word occurrences in academic texts.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a revised list, called the ''
New Academic Word List'' (NAWL), was developed and made public.
This
list
A list is a Set (mathematics), set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of t ...
is available on the
Simple English Wiktionary.
The ''
Academic Vocabulary List'', based on the Academic Word List, drawing from the
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), was developed by Gardner and Davies in 2013. Rather than relying on
word families, like the AWL, the AVL is composed of 3000 English
lemmas, and provides a broader coverage of Academic English.
See also
*
General Service List
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
# Coxhead, A. (2012). Academic Vocabulary, Writing and English for Academic Purposes: Perspectives from Second Language Learners. ''RELC Journal'', ''43''(1), 137–145.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688212439323
# Green, C. (2019). Enriching the academic wordlist and Secondary Vocabulary Lists with lexicogrammar: Toward a pattern grammar of academic vocabulary. ''System'', ''87'', 102158.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2019.102158
# 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
Word lists
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