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).
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:
| 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).
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.
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.