Academic Word List
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a specialized corpus-derived vocabulary resource consisting of 570 word families that occur frequently in written academic English across diverse disciplines, excluding the 2,000 most common words in general English usage. Developed by applied linguist Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington and first published in 2000, the AWL targets English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners and educators by focusing on high-utility terms essential for comprehension and production in scholarly contexts.[1] Coxhead constructed the AWL from a 3.5-million-word corpus of academic prose, drawn equally from four broad fields—arts, commerce, law, and science—encompassing 28 specific subject areas to ensure interdisciplinary relevance. Selection criteria emphasized words' frequency (appearing at least 100 times in the corpus) and range (occurring at least 10 times in each of the four main fields and in at least 15 of the 28 subject areas across 414 texts), yielding families that are distinctly academic rather than general-purpose. This methodology built on prior word lists like the General Service List (GSL) by Michael West (1953), positioning the AWL as a complementary tool for vocabulary expansion beyond everyday language.[2][1] Organized into 10 sublists by decreasing frequency—each containing 60 word families except the final sublist with 30—the AWL covers approximately 10% of all tokens in academic texts when paired with high-frequency vocabulary, significantly aiding reading and writing proficiency. Evaluation studies confirmed its low overlap (1.4%) with non-academic genres like fiction, validating its specialized focus.[3][1] Since its release, the AWL has become a cornerstone in EAP pedagogy worldwide, influencing curriculum design, materials development, and research on academic vocabulary acquisition, with Coxhead noting its unexpectedly broad international adoption over a decade later. Its integration into teaching practices has demonstrated correlations between AWL mastery and improved reading comprehension, underscoring its enduring practical value.[4][5]Overview
Definition and Purpose
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a specialized vocabulary resource comprising 570 word families that appear with high frequency in academic texts across a broad range of disciplines, such as arts, commerce, law, and science, while deliberately excluding the 2,000 most common words found in general English usage.[6] These word families represent lemmas and their derivations (e.g., "analyze," "analysis," "analytical") that are central to scholarly discourse but not covered by everyday vocabulary lists.[1] Developed through rigorous corpus analysis, the AWL identifies lexis that is pervasive in written academic materials, enabling users to prioritize terms essential for comprehension and production in educational contexts.[6] The primary purpose of the AWL is to support English language learners, especially non-native speakers in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, by focusing on vocabulary that constitutes approximately 10% of the total words in typical academic texts.[7] This targeted approach helps bridge the lexical gap between general proficiency and the specialized demands of university-level reading, writing, and discussion, thereby enhancing learners' ability to engage with complex ideas across subjects.[1] By emphasizing these high-incidence academic words, the list facilitates more efficient vocabulary acquisition, allowing learners to achieve greater coverage of academic content with fewer items to memorize.[6] As the first major corpus-based list dedicated to academic-specific lexis, the AWL holds historical significance in applied linguistics by addressing the longstanding need to differentiate general from discipline-spanning scholarly vocabulary, thus informing curriculum design and self-study strategies for higher education preparation.[1] Its target audience consists primarily of non-native English speakers aiming for tertiary studies, including international students and EAP instructors seeking to build foundational academic literacy.[8] The list is structured into 10 sublists ordered by frequency to support progressive teaching.[7]Key Features
The Academic Word List (AWL) employs a word family approach, grouping related lexical items under a single headword to capture morphological variations common in academic discourse. For instance, the headword "analyze" encompasses derivatives such as "analysis," "analyst," and their inflected forms (e.g., "analyzes," "analyzed"), allowing the list to represent a broader set of academic vocabulary efficiently without inflating the total number of entries. This method draws on established principles for defining word families, ensuring that the AWL accounts for how words adapt across contexts while maintaining a compact structure of 570 families. Selection into the AWL is governed by stringent frequency and range criteria applied to a specialized academic corpus. A word family must appear at least 100 times overall, at least 10 times in each of the four main fields (arts, commerce, law, and science), and in at least 15 of the 28 subject areas to demonstrate broad applicability across disciplines.[9] These thresholds prioritize words that are both pervasive and recurrent in scholarly writing, excluding rare or niche terms. The AWL deliberately excludes general high-frequency vocabulary by building upon the 2,000-word General Service List (GSL), focusing solely on additional lexis specific to academic registers. This specialization ensures the list targets vocabulary that enhances comprehension in educational and research contexts beyond everyday English. Collectively, the 570 AWL families account for about 10% of all tokens in academic prose, underscoring their substantial coverage; prominent examples include families like "analyze" and "concept," which appear across diverse fields such as humanities, sciences, and social studies.Development
Creator and Historical Context
The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead, a senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.[10][7] Coxhead created the list as part of her MA thesis, focusing on identifying high-frequency vocabulary items essential for academic discourse across various disciplines.[10][8] The AWL was published in 2000, during a period of expanding interest in corpus linguistics for empirical vocabulary analysis in applied linguistics research.[1] It first appeared in the article "A New Academic Word List" in the journal TESOL Quarterly, volume 34, issue 2, pages 213–238, which detailed its compilation and evaluation based on a specialized academic corpus.[1] This publication represented a shift toward data-driven tools for vocabulary instruction, building briefly on earlier general lists like the General Service List by excluding their coverage to target specialized academic terms.[1][7] Coxhead's motivations stemmed from observed gaps in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, particularly in tertiary preparation contexts where learners struggled with cross-disciplinary academic vocabulary not addressed by high-frequency general words.[10][11] The AWL was designed to support teachers and independent learners by providing a focused, achievable set of 570 word families that occur frequently in academic texts, covering approximately 10% of such material.[10][7]Corpus and Methodology
The Academic Word List (AWL) was compiled from a specialized corpus known as the Academic Corpus, consisting of approximately 3.5 million running words drawn from 414 academic texts authored by more than 400 writers, from a variety of New Zealand and international sources.[12][9] These texts were sourced from a variety of academic materials, including journal articles, book chapters, course workbooks, laboratory manuals, and course notes, ensuring representation of written academic discourse.[12] To promote balance and generality, the corpus was divided into four faculty sections—Arts, Commerce, Law, and Science—each containing about 875,000 words and spanning seven subject areas: Arts (education, history, linguistics, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology), Commerce (accounting, economics, finance, industrial relations, management, marketing, public policy), Law (constitutional law, criminal law, family law and medico-legal, international law, pure commercial law, quasi-commercial law, rights and remedies), and Science (biology, chemistry, computer science, geography, geology, mathematics, physics).[12] Texts were selected to be at least 2,000 words long, representative of their genres, and written for academic audiences, with bibliographies excluded and a mix of short (2,000–5,000 words), medium (5,000–10,000 words), and long (over 10,000 words) items to reflect typical academic reading lengths.[12] The methodology for developing the AWL followed a systematic, empirical approach focused on identifying word families with high frequency and wide range in academic English, excluding those from general high-frequency vocabulary. First, words from the General Service List (GSL)—the 2,000 most frequent word families in English—were removed to isolate specialized academic vocabulary. Second, frequency (total occurrences) and range (distribution across texts and faculties) were calculated using corpus analysis software, with an emphasis on lemmas (base forms) and word families (including derivatives like "analyze," "analysis," and "analytical"). Third, word families were selected if they met strict thresholds: a minimum of 100 total occurrences in the corpus, at least 10 occurrences in each of the four faculty sections, and occurrence in at least 15 of the 28 subject areas to ensure dispersion across disciplines.[13][9] This process yielded 570 word families, prioritizing generality over subject-specific terms. Finally, the selected families were grouped into 10 sublists based on decreasing frequency of occurrence—with Sublist 1 containing the most frequent families and Sublist 10 the least—facilitating prioritized teaching and materials development. The analysis employed corpus tools such as Range software for frequency profiling and range computation, enabling precise lemmatization and family grouping.[7][9] These criteria ensured the AWL captured vocabulary that accounts for about 10% of tokens in academic texts while comprising only 1.4% of all word families, highlighting its efficiency for learners.Composition
Word Families
In the Academic Word List (AWL), a word family is defined as a base word (headword) along with its inflected and derived forms that share a common root, capturing related vocabulary items that learners encounter in academic contexts.[8] For instance, the headword "concept" encompasses forms such as "conceptual," "conceptually," and "conception," reflecting morphological variations that maintain semantic connections.[3] This grouping acknowledges that knowing one form often facilitates recognition or production of others, enhancing efficiency in vocabulary acquisition for academic purposes.[14] The selection of word families in the AWL follows criteria established by Bauer and Nation (1993), which emphasize frequency, regularity, productivity, and predictability of affixes to determine family membership, typically limiting each family to up to 8-10 members based on these morphological principles.[15] These criteria prioritize forms that are both productive (capable of generating new words) and receptive (commonly encountered in reading) within academic writing, ensuring the list targets vocabulary beyond high-frequency general words but essential for scholarly discourse. Coxhead applied these guidelines to identify families that occur across diverse academic disciplines, excluding those already covered in the 2,000 most frequent English word families.[14] The AWL comprises 570 such word families, which collectively represent approximately 3,000 individual word forms, providing broad coverage of specialized academic vocabulary.[16] These families are organized into 10 sublists based on decreasing frequency of occurrence.[7] To illustrate, consider the word family headed by "analyze," which includes "analyst," "analysis," "analytical," "analytically," and "analyzable." In academic usage, this family appears frequently in contexts requiring examination of data or arguments, such as in research methodology sections where "analysis" denotes systematic breakdown of evidence, or in scientific reports employing "analytical" to describe precise evaluative approaches.[8] Another example is the "conclude" family, encompassing "conclude," "conclusion," "conclusive," and "inconclusive." These forms are prevalent in argumentative writing, as in drawing "conclusions" from empirical findings or deeming evidence "inconclusive" in humanities essays.[3] The "define" family, including "define," "definition," "defined," and "redefine," supports conceptual clarity in academic texts, such as providing "definitions" in theoretical frameworks or "redefining" terms in interdisciplinary studies.[8] Finally, the "concept" family—comprising "concept," "conceptual," "conception," and "concepts"—is integral to abstract discussions, appearing in philosophy to outline "conceptual" frameworks or in social sciences to explore evolving "conceptions" of societal norms.[17]Sublists Structure
The Academic Word List (AWL) is divided into 10 sublists, with the first nine comprising 60 word families each and the tenth comprising 30, for a total of 570 families. These sublists are ranked in descending order of frequency and range across the 3.5 million-word academic corpus from which the list was derived, with Sublist 1 containing the most prevalent families and Sublist 10 the least.[3][14] This hierarchical organization reflects the varying density of academic vocabulary in texts. Sublist 1 alone accounts for 3.6% coverage of the corpus, while the cumulative coverage reaches 10.0% by the end of Sublist 10, demonstrating a progressive decrease in individual sublist contributions (e.g., Sublist 2 at 1.8%, Sublist 5 at 0.8%, and Sublist 10 at 0.1%).[18][14] Representative word families from select sublists illustrate this frequency gradient:- Sublist 1 (most frequent): analyse, approach, area, assess, assume, authority, benefit, concept, consist, context.[3]
- Sublist 5 (mid-range): academy, adjust, alter, amend, aware, capacity, challenge, clause, compound, conflict.[3]
- Sublist 10 (least frequent): adjacent, albeit, assemble, collapse, colleague, compile, conceive, convince, depress, encounter.[3]