ACADEMIC VOCABULARY

Introduction

This site will help you expand your academic vocabulary using the Academic Word List (the AWL). All students, home students and overseas students, need to learn the technical vocabulary of their field. As learners of English preparing for academic study you also need to learn general academic vocabulary, words such as: feature, illustrate, regulate, strategy. This core academic vocabulary is used by writers in many different subject areas. Learning vocabulary from the AWL will help you improve your comprehension of academic texts. It will also help you write assignments in an academic style.

Of course the basic vocabulary of English is also important for academic learners. To check if you know this basic vocabulary, look at Word Lists.

How can you use the AWL?

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:

Data was collected by the International Labour Office on hourly rates of pay in fifty different occupations, and on consumer prices for a sample of household items in about 100 countries. After analysis, it was shown that the worth of an hour's work, in terms of purchasing power, varied considerably from one country to another.

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.

Background

The AWL was created by Averil Coxhead in New Zealand. To see the complete AWL look at Coxhead's website.

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 words are divided into 10 sublists according to frequency.

Sublist 1 has the most frequent, for example:

area	factor
benefit	issue
define	research
environment	vary

Sublist 10 has less frequent words, for example:

adjacent	notwithstanding
forthcoming	panel
integrity	persistent
levy	so-called

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