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- The AWL is based on the GSL (1953), which is outdated, and words that have since become high-frequency may be in the AWL unnecessarily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, but 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.