News

As we approach the summer, when we are looking forward to welcoming students from all over the world to study on our online academic English skills courses, we have been reflecting on the importance of learners acquiring academic vocabulary in order to fully access a British curriculum and impress their teachers in their essay writing.

In this blog, we want to focus on the Academic Word List (AWL) which was created by Professor Averil Coxhead, from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in the year 2000. The AWL was originally developed and evaluated for her MA thesis and has subsequently become an essential tool for English for Academic Purposes teachers and students all around the world.

To create the AWL, Professor Coxhead created a corpus of over 400 academic texts (journals, articles, textbooks etc.) which contained approximately 3.5 million words and covered 28 different subject areas.

The list itself contains 570 core words which were selected according to several core principles:

1.       Range: The words in the AWL occurred in academic texts across a wide range of subject areas. This ensures that the words are useful for all students across all areas of study.

2.       Frequency: The words appeared at least 100 times in the corpus, and at least 10 times in each subject area, to be included. This increases the likelihood that learners will encounter these words in their studies.

3.       Excluded words:

a)       The most frequently used 2000 words in general English as learners should know these before developing their academic vocabulary.

b)      Subject-specific ‘technical’ words

c)       Proper Nouns

d)      Latin forms (e.g., ‘et al’, etc., i.e.)

Words on the list regularly appear in exam questions but are often words which students find difficult. As a result, the AWL is incredibly valuable to all students preparing to study an English course. Whilst it is impossible to write a sentence using only words on the list, learning the vocabulary in the AWL helps improve comprehension of academic texts. It also assists students write assignments in a more formal academic style as they develop a better understanding of high frequency collocations and acquire synonyms which help write with a concise richness.

So how can students learn these key words?

The teachers on the Academic Skills in English and English for International Education Courses will be ensure these  important word  items are included in  texts and will model their use whilst teaching. After all, words only have meaning because they have context. This will help with the learners’ receptive knowledge of the words. However, it is also key that learners explicitly focus on these words, learn them, and try to use them in their own writing.

To support with this, the teachers will be helping students develop their active knowledge by facilitating activities such as the following:

i)  Word categorisation tasks

ii) Completing sentence stems that contain the new word

e.g., “Today is significant for be because…”

iii) Identifying ‘examples’ and ‘non-examples’

e.g., “I forgot the date because it is significant” versus “The significant date is marked in my memory”

iv) Word Association games

v) Puzzles, quizzes, and images

This repetition through engaging class activities will all lead up to the end goal. Students using these words more with fluency and accuracy in their writing!