The Academic Word List (AWL) is a
word list 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 id ...
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 (EF ...
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 compl ...
, 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, Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of New Zealand Parliament, Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University of New Z ...
, 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 uni ...
is available on the
Simple English Wiktionary.
See also
*
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 ...
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
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