Academic Word List
The Academic Word List (AWL), compiled by Averil Coxhead (2000) at Victoria University of Wellington, is a list of 570 word families that occur frequently and uniformly across a wide range of academic disciplines but are not among the most general high-frequency words. It remains one of the most influential resources in English for Academic Purposes (EAP).
Development
Coxhead built the AWL from a corpus of 3.5 million running words drawn from 414 texts across four discipline areas: arts, commerce, law, and science (28 subject areas total). Words were selected based on:
- Range — occurring in all four discipline areas and in at least 15 of the 28 subject areas
- Frequency — minimum 100 occurrences in the academic corpus
- Exclusion — not in the General Service List (GSL), West's (1953) list of the 2,000 most frequent English word families
Coverage
| Text type | AWL coverage |
|---|---|
| Academic text | ~10% of running words |
| Fiction | ~1.4% |
| Newspapers | ~4% |
Combined with the GSL (~80% coverage of general text), knowledge of AWL families gives learners access to approximately 90% of the running words in academic text — approaching the 95% threshold considered necessary for adequate comprehension (Laufer, 1989).
Organisation
The 570 families are divided into 10 sublists by frequency, with Sublist 1 containing the most frequent 60 families (analyse, approach, area, assess, assume...) and Sublist 10 containing the least frequent. This grading allows principled sequencing in teaching programmes.
Criticisms and Developments
- The AWL is based on the GSL (1953), which is outdated; words that have since become high-frequency may be in the AWL unnecessarily
- It does not include technical vocabulary specific to individual disciplines
- New Academic Word List (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013) — 963 families based on a larger, more modern corpus
- Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014) — a corpus-based alternative using a different methodology
- The AWL treats Word Families as the unit of counting, assuming that knowing one family member provides access to others — this assumption has been questioned
Teaching Applications
- Vocabulary selection: the AWL provides a principled basis for deciding which words to teach in EAP courses
- Materials development: AWL coverage analysis can evaluate whether textbooks expose learners to high-yield academic vocabulary
- Learner self-study: sublists offer a structured path for independent vocabulary building
- Assessment: AWL-based tests (e.g., Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001) measure academic vocabulary knowledge
Knowledge of AWL items requires Vocabulary Depth — not just recognition of meaning but awareness of Collocation, grammatical patterns, and register constraints. The Morphology of academic vocabulary (heavy use of Latinate affixes: -tion, -ment, -ity, re-, pre-) makes Word Formation knowledge particularly valuable.