New Academic Word List

A 963-headword inventory of academic English designed to supplement the New General Service List in the same way Coxhead's Academic Word List supplemented West's GSL. Compiled by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan, and Joseph Phillips and released in 2013, the NAWL is hosted at newgeneralservicelist.org/nawl-new-academic-word-list.

Background

When the NGSL replaced West's list as a general-English baseline, the AWL — built on top of the GSL in 2000 — no longer fitted cleanly above it. The NAWL was created to give EAP teachers and learners an academic word list whose exclusion criterion is the new general-service inventory rather than the old one, so that any word in the NAWL is genuinely outside everyday high-frequency English as the modern corpus shows it.

Composition

The list is built from a 288-million-word academic corpus assembled from three strands: academic journals, non-fiction, and student essays drawn from the Cambridge English Corpus; spoken academic discourse from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus; and a curated set of top-selling academic textbooks. The 963 headwords are presented as a single ranked list rather than the AWL's ten frequency-banded sublists. The unit of counting is the lemma plus inflected and variant forms, not full Bauer-and-Nation word families, which keeps it consistent with the NGSL.

Coverage and Use

In the academic corpus on which it was built, the NAWL together with the NGSL is reported to cover roughly 92% of running words in academic texts. The list anchors profiling tools such as the NGSL+NAWL AntWordProfiler setting, and underpins the New Academic Word List Test (NAWLT) developed by Stoeckel and colleagues for diagnostic placement. EAP coursebooks and materials writers increasingly tag academic glossaries against the NAWL alongside or in place of the AWL.

Limitations

The NAWL's headword unit makes direct comparison with the AWL imperfect: 963 NAWL headwords are not equivalent to 570 AWL word families, and review studies (e.g. Coxhead, 2018) note that any "academic" list reflects the genres in its source corpus. The NAWL leans on textbook and journal English; discipline-specific technical vocabulary still requires separate analysis. The competing alternative is Nation's BNC COCA Headword Lists (2K 3K 4K) approach, which treats academic vocabulary as bands of mid-frequency BNC/COCA families rather than as a separate list.

References

• Browne, C., Culligan, B., & Phillips, J. (2013). The New Academic Word List. newgeneralservicelist.org/nawl-new-academic-word-list
• Coxhead, A. (2018). Replication research in pedagogical approaches to formulaic sequences. Language Teaching, 51(3), 403–414.
• Stoeckel, T., & Bennett, P. (2015). A test of the New Academic Word List. Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, 4(1), 1–8.