A New Academic Word List

Author(s): Averil Coxhead

Source: TESOL Quarterly , Summer, 2000, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 213-238
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3587951

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A New Academic Word List
AVERIL COXHEAD
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand

This article describes the development and evaluation of a n

demic word list (Coxhead, 1998), which was compiled from a co
3.5 million running words of written academic text by examin
range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most fre
occurring words of English, as described by West (1953). Th
contains 570 word families that account for approximately 10.0
total words (tokens) in academic texts but only 1.4% of the tot
in a fiction collection of the same size. This difference in c
provides evidence that the list contains predominantly academi
By highlighting the words that university students meet in a w
of academic texts, the AWL shows learners with academic goals
words are most worth studying. The list also provides a useful
further research into the nature of academic vocabulary.

One of the most challenging aspects of vocabulary le

teaching in English for academic purposes (EAP) prog
making principled decisions about which words are worth
during valuable class and independent study time. Academ
causes a great deal of difficulty for learners (Cohen, Glasman,
Cohen, Ferrara, & Fine, 1988) because students are gener
familiar with it as they are with technical vocabulary in the
and because academic lexical items occur with lower fre
general-service vocabulary items do (Worthington & Natio
& Nation, 1984).
The General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953), developed from a
corpus of 5 million words with the needs of ESL/EFL learners in mind,
contains the most widely useful 2,000 word families in English. West used
a variety of criteria to select these words, including frequency, ease of
learning, coverage of useful concepts, and stylistic level (pp. ix-x). The
GSL has been criticised for its size (Engels, 1968), age (Richards, 1974),
and need for revision (Hwang, 1989). Despite these criticisms, the GSL
covers up to 90% of fiction texts (Hirsh, 1993), up to 75% of nonfiction
texts (Hwang, 1989), and up to 76% of the Academic Corpus (Coxhead,

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol.34, No.2, Summer 2000 213

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1998), the corpus of written academic English compiled for this study.
There has been no comparable replacement for the GSL up to now.
Academic words (e.g., substitute, underlie, establish, inherent) are not
highly salient in academic texts, as they are supportive of but not central
to the topics of the texts in which they occur. A variety of word lists have
been compiled either by hand or by computer to identify the most useful
words in an academic vocabulary. Campion and Elley (1971) and
Praninskas (1972) based their lists on corpora and identified words that
occurred across a range of texts whereas Lynn (1973) and Ghadessy
(1979) compiled word lists by tracking student annotations above words
in textbooks. All four studies were developed without the help of
computers. Xue and Nation (1984) created the University Word List
(UWL) by editing and combining the four lists mentioned above. The
UWL has been widely used by learners, teachers, course designers, and
researchers. However, as an amalgam of the four different studies, it
lacked consistent selection principles and had many of the weaknesses of
the prior work. The corpora on which the studies were based were small
and did not contain a wide and balanced range of topics.
An academic word list should play a crucial role in setting vocabulary
goals for language courses, guiding learners in their independent study,
and informing course and material designers in selecting texts and
developing learning activities. However, given the problems with cur-
rently available academic vocabulary lists, there is a need for a new
academic word list based on data gathered from a large, well-designed
corpus of academic English. The ideal word list would be divided into
smaller, frequency-based sublists to aid in the sequencing of teaching
and in materials development. A word list based on the occurrence of
word families in a corpus of texts representing a variety of academic
registers can provide information about how words are actually used
(Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1994).
The research reported in this article drew upon principles from
corpus linguistics (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998; Kennedy, 1998) to
clevelop and evaluate a new academic word list. After discussing issues
that arise in the creation of a word list through a corpus-based study, I
describe the methods used in compiling the Academic Corpus and in
developing the AWL. The next section examines the coverage of the
AWL relative to the complete Academic Corpus and to its four discipline-
specific subcorpora. To evaluate the AWL, I discuss its coverage of (a) the
Academic Corpus along with the GSL (West, 1953), (b) a second
collection of academic texts, and (c) a collection of fiction texts, and
compare it with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984). In concluding, I discuss
the list's implications for teaching and for materials and course design,
and I outline future research needs.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC CORPORA
AND WORD LISTS

Teachers and materials developers who work with voca

often assume that frequently occurring words and those whi
many different kinds of texts may be more useful for langu
to study than infrequently occurring words and those whose
are largely restricted to a particular text or type of text (Nat
West, 1953). Given the assumption that frequency and c
important criteria for selecting vocabulary, a corpus, or
texts, is a valuable source of empirical information that c
examine the language in depth (Biber, Conrad, & Rep
However, exactly how a corpus should be developed is no
Issues that arise include the representativeness of the texts o
the researcher (Biber, 1993), the organization of the cor
(Biber, 1993; Sinclair, 1991), and the criteria used for word s

Representation

Research in corpus linguistics (Biber, 1989) has shown that the

linguistic features of texts differ across registers. Perhaps the most
notable of these features is vocabulary. To describe the vocabulary of a
particular register, such as academic texts, the corpus must therefore
contain texts that are representative of the varieties of texts they are
intended to reflect (Atkins, Clear, & Ostler, 1992; Biber, 1993; Sinclair,
1991). Sinclair (1991) warns that a corpus should contain texts whose
sizes and shapes accurately reflect the texts they represent. If long texts
are included in a corpus, "peculiarities of an individual style or topic
occasionally show through" (p. 19), particularly through the vocabulary.
Making use of a variety of short texts allows more variation in vocabulary
(Sutarsyah, Nation, & Kennedy, 1994). Inclusion of texts written by a
variety of writers helps neutralise bias that may result from the idiosyn-
cratic style of one writer (Atkins et al., 1992; Sinclair, 1991) and increases
the number of lexical items in the corpus (Sutarsyah et al., 1994).
Scholars who have compiled corpora have attempted to include a
variety of academic texts. Campion and Elley's (1971) corpus consisted
of 23 textbooks, 19 lectures published in journals, and a selection of
university examination papers. Praninskas (1972) used a corpus of 10
first-year, university-level arts and sciences textbooks that were required
reading at the American University of Beirut. Lynn (1973) and Ghadessy
(1979) both focussed on textbooks used in their universities. Lynn's
corpus included 52 textbooks and 4 classroom handouts from 50

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students of accounting, business administration, and economics from
which 10,000 annotations were collected by hand. The resulting list
contained 197 word families arranged from those occurring the most
frequently (39 times) to those occurring the least frequently. Words
occurring fewer than 10 times were omitted from the list (p. 26).
Ghadessy compiled a corpus of 20 textbooks from three disciplines
(chemistry, biology, and physics). Words that students had glossed were
recorded by hand, and the final list of 795 items was then arranged in
alphabetical order (p. 27). Relative to this prior work, the corpus
compiled for the present study considerably expands the representation
of academic writing in part by including a variety of academic sources
besides textbooks.

Organization

A register such as academic texts encompasses a variety of subregisters.

An academic word list should contain an even-handed selection of words
that appear across the various subject areas covered by the t
contained within the corpus. Organizing the corpus into coh
sections of equal size allows the researcher to measure the rang
occurrence of the academic vocabulary across the different discip
and subject areas of the corpus. Campion and Elley (1971) create
corpus with 19 academic subject areas, selecting words occurring out
of the first 5,000 words of Thorndike and Lorge's (1944) list
excluding words encountered in only one discipline (p. 7). The co
for the present study involved 28 subject areas organised into 7 gen
areas within each of four disciplines: arts, commerce, law, and scien

Size

A corpus designed for the study of academic vocabulary should b

large enough to ensure a reasonable number of occurrences of academic
words. According to Sinclair (1991), a corpus should include millions
running words (tokens) to ensure that a very large sample of language i
available (p. 18).1 The exact amount of language required, of cours
depends on the purpose and use of the research; however, in genera
more language means that more information can be gathered abou
lexical items and more words in context can be examined in depth.

'The term running words (or tokens) refers to the total number of word forms in a tex
whereas the term individual words (types) refers to each different word in a text, irrespective
how many times it occurs.

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 In the past, researchers attempted to work with academic corpora by
hand, which limited the numbers of words they could analyze. Campion
and Elley (1971), in their corpus of 301,800 running words, analysed
234,000 words in textbooks, 57,000 words from articles in journals, and
10,800 words in a number of examination papers (p. 4). Praninskas's
(1972) corpus consisted of approximately 272,000 running words (p. 8),
Lynn (1973) examined 52 books and 4 classroom handouts (p. 26), and
Ghadessy (1979) compiled a corpus of 478,700 running words. Praninskas
(1972) included a criterion of range in her list and selected words that
were outside the GSL (West, 1953).
In the current study, the original target was to gather 4.0 million
words; however, time pressures and lack of available texts limited the
corpus to approximately 3.5 million running words. The decision about
size was based on an arbitrary criterion relating to the number of
occurrences necessary to qualify a word for inclusion in the word list: If
the corpus contained at least 100 occurrences of a word family, allowing
on average at least 25 occurrences in each of the four sections of the
corpus, the word was included. Study of data from. the Brown Corpus
(Francis & Kucera, 1982) indicated that a corpus of around 3.5 million
words would be needed to identify 100 occurrences of a word family.

Word Selection

An important issue in the development of word lists is the crit

word selection, as different criteria can lead to different results. Re-
searchers have used two methods of selection for academic word lists. As
mentioned, Lynn (1973) and Ghadessy (1979) selected words tha
learners had annotated regularly in their textbooks, believing that th
annotation signalled difficulty in learning or understanding those word
during reading. Campion and Elley (1971) selected words based on the
occurrence in 3 or more of 19 subject areas and then applied criteri
including the degree of familiarity to native speakers. However, th
number of running words in the complete corpus was too small for man
words to meet the initial criterion. Praninskas (1972) also included
criterion of range in her list; however, the range of subject areas an
number of running words was also small, resulting in a small list witho
much variety in the words.
Another issue that arises in developing word lists is defining what to
count as a word. The problem is that lexical items that may be
morphologically distinct from one another are, in fact, strongly enough
related that they should be considered to represent a single lexical item.
To address this issue, word lists for learners of English generally group
words into families (West, 1953; Xue & Nation, 1984). This solution i

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supported by evidence suggesting that word families are an important
unit in the mental lexicon (Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott, &
Stallman, 1989, p. 262). Comprehending regularly inflected or derived
members of a family does not require much more effort by learners if
they know the base word and if they have control of basic word-building
processes (Bauer & Nation, 1993, p. 253). In the present study, therefore,
words were defined through the unit of the word family, as illustrated in
Table 1.
For the creation of the AWL, a word family was defined as a stem pl
all closely related affixed forms, as defined by Level 6 of Bauer
Nation's (1993) scale. The Level 6 definition of affix includes all
inflections and the most frequent, productive, and regular prefixes and
suffixes (p. 255). It includes only affixes that can be added to stems th
can stand as free forms (e.g., specify and special are not in the same wor
family because spec is not a free form).

Research Questions

The purpose of the research described here was to develop an

evaluate a new academic word list on the basis of a larger, mo
principled corpus than had been used in previous research. T
questions framed the description of the AWL:
1. Which lexical items occur frequently and uniformly across a wi
range of academic material but are not among the first 2,000 words
of English as given in the GSL (West, 1953)?
2. Do the lexical items occur with different frequencies in arts, co
merce, law, and science texts?

TABLE 1

Sample Word Families From the Academic Word List

concept legislate indicate

conception legislated indicated

concepts legislates indicates
conceptual legislating indicating
conceptualisation legislation indication
conceptualise legislative indications
conceptualised legislator indicative
conceptualises legislators indicator
conceptualising legislature indicators
conceptually

Note. Words in italics are the most frequent form in that family occurring in the Academic
Corpus.

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The evaluation of the AWL considered the following questions:
3. What percentage of the words in the Academic Corpus does the AWL
cover?

4. Do the lexical items identified occur frequently in an independent

collection of academic texts?

5. How frequently do the words in the AWL occur in nonacade

texts?

6. How does the AWL compare with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1

METHODOLOGY

The development phase of the project identified wor

criteria for inclusion in the AWL (Research Questions
evaluation phase, I calculated the AWL's coverage of the o
and compared the AWL with words found in another
with those in a nonacademic corpus, and with another
list (Questions 3-6).

Developing the Academic Corpus

Developing the corpus involved collecting each text

form, removing its bibliography, and counting its words.
the number of short, medium-length, and long texts
discussion on the length of texts), each text was inserted
area computer file in alphabetical order according to the
Each subject-area file was then inserted into a discipline
alphabetical order according to the subject. Any text
selection criteria but was not included in the Academi
its corresponding subject area was complete was kept a
second corpus used to test the AWL's coverage at a l
resulting corpus contained 414 academic texts by
authors, containing 3,513,330 tokens (running words)
(individual words) in approximately 11,666 pages of text.
divided into four subcorpora: arts, commerce, law, an
containing approximately 875,000 running words and
into seven subject areas (see Table 2).
The corpus includes the following representative t
academic domain: 158 articles from academic journal
demic journal articles from the World Wide Web, 43 com
textbooks or course books, 42 texts from the Learned and Scientific
section of the Wellington Corpus of Written English (Bauer, 1993), 41

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 TABLE 2

Composition of the Academic Corpus

Discipline

Arts Commerce Law Science Total

Running 883,214 879,547 874,723 875,846 351,333

words

Texts 122 107 72 113 414

Subject Education Accounting Constitutional Biology

areas History Economics Criminal Chemistry
Linguistics Finance Family and Computer science
Philosophy Industrial medicolegal Geography
Politics relations International Geology
Psychology Management Pure commercial Mathematics
Sociology Marketing Quasi-commercial Physics
Public policy Rights and remedies

texts from the Learned and Scientific section of the Brown Co

(Francis & Kucera, 1982), 33 chapters from university textbooks, 31
from the Learned and Scientific section of the Lancaster-Oslo/Be
(LOB) Corpus (Johansson, 1978), 13 books from the Academic T
section of the MicroConcord academic corpus (Murison-Bowie, 1
and 2 university psychology laboratory manuals.
The majority of the texts were written for an international audie
Sixty-four percent were sourced in New Zealand, 20% in Britain, 13%
the United States, 2% in Canada, and 1% in Australia. It is difficult t
exactly what influence the origin of the texts would have on the cor
for even though a text was published in one country, at least some o
authors may well have come from another.
The Academic Corpus was organized to allow the range of occurren
of particular words to be examined. Psychology and sociology texts w
placed in the arts section on the basis of Biber's (1989) finding that
from the social sciences (psychology and sociology) shared synt
characteristics with texts from the arts (p. 28). Lexical items may
pattern similarly. Placing the social science subject areas in the sc
section of the Academic Corpus might have introduced a bias: T
psychology and sociology texts might have added lexical items th
not occur in any great number in any other subject in the scie
section. The presence of these items, in turn, would have suggested
science and arts texts share more academic vocabulary items th
generally true.
With the exception of the small number of texts from the Br
(Francis & Kucera, 1982), LOB (Johansson, 1978), and Wellin

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(Bauer, 1993) corpora, the texts in the Academic Corpus were complete.
The fact that frequency of occurrence of words was only one of the
criteria for selecting texts minimized any possible bias from word
repetition within longer texts. To maintain a balance of long and short
texts, the four main sections (and, within each section, the seven subject
areas) each contained approximately equal numbers of short texts
(2,000-5,000 running words), medium texts (5,000-10,000 running
words), and long texts (more than 10,000 running words). The break-
down of texts in the four main sections was as follows: arts-18 long, 35
medium; commerce-18 long, 37 medium; law-23 long, 22 medium;
and science-19 long, 37 medium.

Developing the Academic Word List

The corpus analysis programme Range (Heatley & Nation, 1996) was
used to count and sort the words in the Academic Corpus. This
programme counts the frequency of words in up to 32 files at a time and
records the number of files in which each word occurs (range) and the
frequency of occurrence of the words in total and in each file.
Words were selected for the AWL based on three criteria:

1. Specialised occurrence: The word families included had to be ou

the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English
represented by West's (1953) GSL.
2. Range: A member of a word family had to occur at least 10 times
each of the four main sections of the corpus and in 15 or more of
28 subject areas.
3. Frequency: Members of a word family had to occur at least 100 tim
the Academic Corpus.
Frequency was considered secondary to range because a word co
based mainly on frequency would have been biased by longer text
topic-related words. For example, the Collins COBUILD Dictionary (19
highlights Yemeni and Lithuanian as high-frequency words, pro
because the corpus on which the dictionary is based contains a
number of newspapers from the early 1990s.
The conservative threshold of a frequency of 100 was applied stric
for multiple-member word families but not so stringently for
families with only one member, as single-member families operate a
disadvantage in gaining a high frequency of occurrence. In the
demic Corpus, the word family with only one member that occur
least frequently is forthcoming (80 occurrences).

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RESULTS

Description

Occurrence of Academic Words

The first research question asked which lexical items beyond the first
2,000 in West's (1953) GSL occur frequently across a range of academic
texts. In the Academic Corpus, 570 word families met the criteria for
inclusion in the AWL (see Appendix A). Some of the most frequent word
families in the AWL are analyse, concept, data, and research. Some of the
least frequent are convince, notwithstanding, ongoing, persist, and whereby.

Differences in Occurrence of Words Across Disciplines

The second question was whether the lexical items selected for the
AWL occur with different frequencies in arts, commerce, law, and
science texts. The list appears to be slightly advantageous for commerce
students, as it covers 12.0% of the commerce subcorpus. The coverage of
arts and of law is very similar (9.3% and 9.4%, respectively), and the
coverage of science is the lowest among the four disciplines (9.1%). The
3.0% difference between the coverage of the commerce subcorpus and
the coverage of the other three subcorpora may result from the presence
of key lexical items such as economic, export, finance, and income, which
occur with very high frequency in commerce texts. (See Appendix B for
excerpts from texts in each section of the Academic Corpus.)
The words in the AWL occur in a wide range of the subject areas in the
Academic Corpus. Of the 570 word families in the list, 172 occur in all 28
subject areas, and 263 (172 + 91) occur in 27 or more subject areas (see
Table 3). In total, 67% of the word families in the AWL occur in 25 or
more of the 28 subject areas, and 94% occur in 20 or more.

Evaluation

Coverage of the Academic Corpus Beyond the GSL

The AWL accounts for 10.0% of the tokens in the Academic

This coverage is more than twice that of the third 1,000 most fre
words, according to Francis and Kucera's (1982) count, which
4.3% of the Brown Corpus. Taken together, the first 2,000 wo
West's (1953) GSL and the word families in the AWL account for
approximately 86% of the Academic Corpus (see Table 4). Note that t
AWL's coverage of the Academic Corpus is double that of the seco

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 TABLE 3

Subject-Area Coverage of Word Families in the Academic Word List

No. of Subject areas in No. of Subject areas in

word families which they occurred word families which they occurred

172 28 20 21
91 27 15 20
58 26 9 19
62 25 9 18
43 24 5 17
43 23 5 16
33 22 4 15

Note. Total s

1,000 wor
2,550 word families, and all but 12 of those in the GSL occur in the
Academic Corpus.
The AWL, the first 1,000 words of the GSL (West, 1953), and the
second 1,000 words of the GSL cover the arts, commerce, and law
subcorpora similarly but in very different patterns (see Table 5). The first
1,000 words of the GSL account for fewer of the word families in the
commerce subcorpus than in the arts and law subcorpora, but this lower
coverage of commerce is balanced by the AWL's higher coverage of this
discipline. On the other hand, the AWL's coverage of the arts and law
subcorpora is lower than its coverage of the commerce subcorpus, but
the GSL's coverage of arts and law is slightly higher than its coverage of
commerce. The AWL's coverage of the science subcorpus is 9.1%, which
indicates that the list is also extremely useful for science students. The
GSL, in contrast, is not quite as useful for science students as it is for arts,
commerce, and law students.

TABLE 4

Coverage of the Academic Corpus by the Academic Word List

and the General Service List (West, 1953)

No. of word families

Coverage of In Academic

Word list Academic Corpus (%) Total Corpus

Academic Word List 10.0 570 570

General Service List

First 1,000 words 71.4 1,001 1,000
Second 1,000 words 4.7 979 968
Total 86.1 2,550 2,538

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 TABLE 5

Coverage of the Four Subcorpora of the Academic Corpus

by the General Service List (West, 1953) and the Academic Word List (%)

General Service List

Academic First 1,000 Second 1,000

Subcorpus Word List words words Total

Arts 9.3 73.0 4.4 86.7

Commerce 12.0 71.6 5.2 88.8

Law 9.4 75.0 4.1 88.5

Science 9.1 65.7 5.0 79.8

Coverage of Anoth

A frequency-based
should be expected
covers a different collection of similar texts. To establish whether the
AWL maintains high coverage over academic texts other than th
the Academic Corpus, I compiled a second corpus of academic te
English, using the same criteria and sources to select texts and divi
them into the same four disciplines. This corpus comprised ap
mately 678,000 tokens (82,000 in arts, 53,000 in commerce, 143,
law, and 400,000 in science) representing 32,539 types of lexical
This second corpus was made up of texts that had met the crite
inclusion in the Academic Corpus but were not included either b
they were collected too late or because the subject area they belong
was already complete.
The AWL's coverage of the second corpus is 8.5% (see Table 6)
all 570 word families in the AWL occur in the second corpus. The G
coverage of the second corpus (66.2%) is consistent with its cove
the science section of the Academic Corpus (65.7%). The overall
coverage of the second corpus by both the AWL and the GSL (7
seems to be partly the result of the large proportion of science tex
contains.

Coverage of Nonacademic Texts

To establish that the AWL is truly an academic word list rather than
general-service word list, I developed a collection of 3,763,733 runni
words of fiction texts. The collection consisted of 50 texts from Projec
Gutenberg's (http://www.gutenberg.net) collection of texts that we
written more than 50 years ago and are thus in the public domain. The

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 TABLE 6

Coverage of the Academic Corpus and the Second Corpus of Academic Texts b
Academic Word List and the General Service List (West, 1953) (%)

Word list Coverage of Academic Corpus Coverage of second corpus

Academic Word List 10.0 8.5

General Service List

First 1,000 words 71.4 66.2
Second 1,000 words 4.7 4.4
Total 86.1 79.1

fact that th
important,
tion was to f
fiction texts
of lexical ite
The AWL ac
collection, m
Corpus. The
word famil
writing (see
that the wo
collection, a
However, an
Of the AWL
occur with m
additional 86

TABLE 7

Occurrence of the AWL Word Families in the Academic Corpus and the Fiction Collecti

Frequency of occurrence No. of AWL word families

Not in fiction collection 30

In Academic Corpus
Four or more times as frequently as in fiction collection 380
Three times as frequently as in fiction collection 34
Twice as frequently as in fiction collection 52
Less than twice as frequently as in fiction collection 52
Less frequently than in fiction collection 22
Total 570

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they do in fiction texts. The remaining 74 (those occurring less than
twice as frequently in academic texts as they do in fiction texts and those
occurring less frequently in academic than in fiction texts) are candi-
dates for inclusion in a new general-service word list, depending on the
selection criteria for that list.

Comparison With the University Word List

The UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984), created through the amalgamation
of four existing word lists, contains 836 word families consisting of 3,70
types and covers 8.5% of the Learned and Scientific sections of the LOB
corpus of written British English (Johansson, 1978) and the paral
Wellington corpus of written English (Bauer, 1993). It covers 9.8% of th
Academic Corpus, slightly less than the 10.0% coverage of the corpus by
the AWL. Therefore, the AWL, though smaller, gives a better return o
learning, as students would need to learn only 570 word families instead
of 836 for the same coverage of academic texts.
The overlap between the AWL and the UWL is 51%, with 435 wor
families occurring in both. This leaves 401 word families occurring only
in the UWL and 135 word families occurring only in the AWL. Th
explanation for the large number of word families occurring in the UW
but not in the AWL lies in the criteria for including word families in th
AWL: Members of a word family had to occur at least 100 times in t
Academic Corpus. Approximately 150 of the word families that are only
in the UWL occurred in the Academic Corpus less than 50 times, or onl
once in more than 174 pages of 400 words, and therefore would not hav
been included in the AWL. Other words in the UWL did not meet the
range criterion for the AWL.
The UWL contains more than 133 word families that do not occur in
all four sections of the Academic Corpus (Table 8). Thus students co
learn these words but might rarely or never encounter them in academ
texts. Although the UWL contains useful words for students to learn,
shown by the 9.8% coverage of the Academic Corpus, the AWL is smal
has a higher coverage of academic texts, and covers a far wider range
subject areas.

CONCLUSION

The Academic Word List includes 570 word families that constitute a
specialised vocabulary with good coverage of academic texts, regardles
of the subject area. It accounts for 10% of the total tokens in the
Academic Corpus, and more than 94% of the words in the list occur in
20 or more of the 28 subject areas of the Academic Corpus. Thes

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 TABLE 8

Characteristics of the Academic Word List and the

University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984)

Characteristic Academic Word List University Word List

Word families (total) 570 836

Types 3,110 3,707
Coverage of Academic Corpus (%) 10.0 9.8
Inclusion of word families

In four sections of Academic Corpus 570 703

In three sections of Academic Corpus 0 84
In two sections of Academic Corpus 0 39
In one section of Academic Corpus 0 6
Not found in Academic Corpus 0 1
In General Service List (West, 1953) 0 3

findings are useful in teaching English an

research.

Implications for Teaching

The AWL is the result of a corpus-based study. Such studies create list
concordances, or data concerning the clustering of linguistic items
coherent, purposeful texts. The use of this research method, howeve
does not imply that language teaching and learning should rely on
decontextualised methods. Instead, the AWL might be used to s
vocabulary goals for EAP courses, construct relevant teaching materials
and help students focus on useful vocabulary items.
The AWL will be most valuable in setting goals for EAP courses. This
study has identified vocabulary to include in teaching and learnin
materials, but there remains a need to design tests to diagnose whether
learners know this vocabulary and whether attempts to teach and learn
have been successful. Such tests exist for the UWL (Nation, 1983);
similar tests based on the AWL are under development.
The UWL and one of its predecessors, the American University Word List
(Praninskas, 1972), served as the basis for course books specifically
designed to teach academic vocabulary (Farid, 1985; Valcourt & Wells,
1999; Yorkey, 1981). It is hoped that authors will undertake to write
similar books based on the AWL. In addition, a useful direction for
materials development would be the design of texts that provide optimal
conditions for meeting and learning academic vocabulary. This initiative
might involve adapting academic texts so that the density of unknow

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words, particularly academic vocabulary and low-frequency words, is not
too high and the opportunities for repeated exposure to the academic
vocabulary are optimised.
The direct learning and direct teaching of the words in the AWL also
have value. Courses that involve direct attention to language features
have been found to result in better learning than courses that rely solely
on incidental learning (Ellis, 1990; Long, 1988). Using subdivisions of
the AWL, teachers and students can set short-term vocabulary learning
goals of reasonable size during courses of study. The AWL can be divided
into 10 rank-ordered sublists according to decreasing word family
frequency (Table 9). With the exception of Sublist 10, each sublist
contains 60 items. The words in the first 3 sublists occur with compara-
tively high frequency (on average, in at least every 12.0 pages of text). On
average, each word in Sublist 1 occurs once in 4.3 pages of academic text,
assuming that each page is 400 words long. These 60 words account for
more than one third of the total coverage of the list, and the next most
frequently occurring 60 words (Sublist 2) provide just half the coverage
of the first 60 words. Even though Sublists 5-10 add little to the overall
coverage of the AWL, they are worth including, as these less frequent
items occur in a wide range of texts and are unlikely to be acquired
incidentally through reading.
Direct teaching through vocabulary exercises, teacher explanation,
and awareness raising, and deliberate learning using word cards need to
be balanced with opportunities to meet the vocabulary in message-
focused reading and listening and to use the vocabulary in speaking and
writing. For direct study of the vocabulary, teachers and learners can
work from the list itself. More than 82% of the words in the AWL are of

TABLE 9

Sublists of the Academic Word List

Coverage of Pages per

Cumulative repetition in
Academic

Sublist Items Corpus (%) coverage (%) Academic Corpus

1 60 3.6 3.6 4.3

2 60 1.8 5.4 8.4
3 60 1.2 6.6 12.3
4 60 0.9 7.5 15.9
5 60 0.8 8.3 19.4
6 60 0.6 8.9 24.0
7 60 0.5 9.4 30.8
8 60 0.3 9.7 49.4
9 60 0.2 9.9 67.3
10 30 0.1 10.0 82.5

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Greek or Latin origin, indicating that the study of prefixes, suffixes, and
stems may be one way to study this vocabulary.
By focusing on this academic vocabulary in both message-focussed
and language-focussed ways, learners gain the opportunity to make this
important vocabulary a part of their working knowledge of the language
and thus help make their academic study more manageable.

Future Research

The results of this research show that the development an

large corpora hold promise for obtaining information about voca
frequency in registers of interest for language teaching. Future
might fruitfully build on these findings in four ways.
1. Compare the findings obtained from the Academic Corpu
those from larger corpora, such as those used for dictionary
In this study, the collection of texts used for comparison
Academic Corpus was smaller rather than larger than the
Academic Corpus, and its lack of balance in the number of ru
words per discipline made a full comparison impossible. In add
the law subcorpus contained only half the number of short t
as did the other three subcorpora (arts, 60; commerce, 52;
57), which may have resulted in less variety in the vocabulary
law subcorpus. Approximately 6% (or 228,000 running words)
Academic Corpus consisted of 114 incomplete texts of 2,000 r
words that came from the Brown (Francis & Kucera, 1982)
(Johansson, 1978), and Wellington (Bauer, 1993) corpora. W
the majority of the texts in the Academic Corpus were w
between 1993 and 1996, the texts from the LOB and Brown co
were written in 1961.

2. Obtain more in-depth information about academic vocabulary. Do

each of the words in the AWL have roughly the same meaning over
range of subject areas? If not, how can teachers effectively teac
learners to recognize distinctions of meaning in different subje
areas? Do some lexical items take on a grammatical-type function in
texts?

3. Investigate whether learners would be well served by further lists of

subtechnical and technical vocabulary in subject areas or whethe
this knowledge is more easily developed through reading.
4. Investigate the AWL in regard to spoken academic English. Does t
AWL, which is based on written academic English, account for
spoken academic English, or is this a completely separate genre that
needs its own academic word list?

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 Good knowledge of academic vocabulary is essential for success at
higher levels of education (Corson, 1997). By highlighting the words
that university students will meet in a wide range of academic texts, the
AWL provides the foundation for a systematic approach to academic
vocabulary development and may serve as a useful basis for further
research into the nature of academic vocabulary.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research is based on a master's thesis completed at Victoria Uni

Wellington. I would like to thank my supervisor, Paul Nation, for h
comments, suggestions, and encouragement during the writing of the th
article. I am grateful also to Graeme Kennedy for his comments and
Quarterly's reviewers and editor.

THE AUTHOR

Averil Coxhead teaches English for academic purposes in the Scho

and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellingto

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APPENDIX A

Headwords2 of the Word Families in the Academic Word List

Numbers indicate the sublist of the Academic Word List (e.g., abandon and its family memb
are in Sublist 8). Sublist 1 contains the most frequent words in the list, and Sublist 10 conta
the least frequent.

abandon 8 aspect 2 coincide 9

abstract 6 assemble 10 collapse 10
academy 5 assess 1 colleague 10
access 4 assign 6 commence 9
accommodate 9 assist 2 comment 3
accompany 8 assume 1 commission 2
accumulate 8 assure 9 commit 4
accurate 6 attach 6 commodity 8
achieve 2 attain 9 communicate 4
acknowledge 6 attitude 4 community 2
acquire 2 attribute 4 compatible 9
adapt 7 author 6 compensate 3
adequate 4 authority 1 compile 10
adjacent 10 automate 8 complement 8
adjust 5 available 1 complex 2
administrate 2 aware 5 component 3
adult 7 behalf 9 compound 5
advocate 7 benefit 1 comprehensive 7
affect 2 bias 8 comprise 7
aggregate 6 bond 6 compute 2
aid 7 brief 6 conceive 10
albeit 10 bulk 9 concentrate 4
allocate 6 capable 6 concept 1
alter 5 capacity 5 conclude 2
alternative 3 category 2 concurrent 9
ambiguous 8 cease 9 conduct 2
amend 5 challenge 5 confer 4
analogy 9 channel 7 confine 9
analyse 1 chapter 2 confirm 7
annual 4 chart 8 conflict 5
anticipate 9 chemical 7 conform 8
apparent 4 circumstance 3 consent 3
append 8 cite 6 consequent 2
appreciate 8 civil 4 considerable 3
approach 1 clarify 8 consist 1
appropriate 2 classic 7 constant 3
approximate 4 clause 5 constitute 1
arbitrary 8 code 4 constrain 3
area 1 coherent 9 construct 2

2 Headwords are stem noun or verb forms.

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consult 5 document 3 flexible 6
consume 2 domain 6 fluctuate 8
contact 5 domestic 4 focus 2
contemporary 8 dominate 3 format 9
context 1 draft 5 formula 1
contract 1 drama 8 forthcoming 10
contradict 8 duration 9 foundation 7
contrary 7 dynamic 7 found 9
contrast 4 economy 1 framework 3
contribute 3 edit 6 function 1

controversy 9 element 2 fund 3

convene 3 eliminate 7 fundamental 5
converse 9 emerge 4 furthermore 6
convert 7 emphasis 3 gender 6
convince 10 empirical 7 generate 5

cooperate 6 enable 5 generation 5

coordinate 3 encounter 10 globe 7
core 3 energy 5 goal 4

corporate 3 enforce 5 grade 7

correspond 3 enhance 6 grant 4

couple 7 enormous 10 guarantee 7

create 1 ensure 3 guideline 8
credit 2 entity 5 hence 4
criteria 3 environment 1 hierarchy 7
crucial 8 equate 2 highlight 8
culture 2 equip 7 hypothesis 4

currency 8 equivalent 5 identical 7

cycle 4 erode 9 identify 1
data 1 error
4 ideology 7
debate 4 establish 1 ignorance 6
decade 7 estate 6 illustrate 3
decline 5 estimate 1 image 5
deduce 3 ethic 9 immigrate 3
define 1 ethnic 4 impact 2
definite 7 evaluate 2 implement 4
demonstrate 3 eventual 8 implicate 4
denote 8 evident 1 implicit 8

deny 7 evolve 5 imply 3

depress 10 exceed 6 impose 4
derive 1 exclude 3 incentive 6

design 2 exhibit 8 incidence 6

despite 4 expand 5 incline 10

detect 8 expert 6 income 1
deviate 8 explicit 6 incorporate 6
device 9 exploit 8 index 6
devote 9 export 1 indicate 1
differentiate 7 expose 5 individual 1
dimension 4 external 5 induce 8
diminish 9 extract 7 inevitable 8
discrete 5 facilitate 5 infer 7
discriminate 6 factor 1 infrastructure 8

displace 8 feature 2 inherent 9

display 6 federal 6 inhibit 6

dispose 7 fee 6 initial 3

distinct 2 file 7 initiate 6
distort 9 final 2 injure 2
distribute 1 finance 1 innovate 7
diverse 6 finite 7 input 6

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 insert 7 minimise 8 precede 6
insight 9 minimum 6 precise 5
inspect 8 ministry 6 predict 4
instance 3 minor 3 predominant 8
institute 2 mode 7 preliminary 9
instruct 6 modify 5 presume 6
integral 9 monitor 5 previous 2
integrate 4 motive 6 primary 2
integrity 10 mutual 9 prime 5
intelligence 6 negate 3 principal 4
intense 8 network 5 principle 1
interact 3 neutral 6 prior 4
intermediate 9 nevertheless 6 priority 7
internal 4 nonetheless 10 proceed 1
interpret I norm 9 process 1
interval 6 normal 2 professional 4
intervene 7 notion 5 prohibit 7
intrinsic 10 notwithstanding 10 project 4
invest 2 nuclear 8 promote 4
investigate 4 objective 5 proportion 3
invoke 10 obtain 2 prospect 8
involve 1 obvious 4 protocol 9
isolate 7 occupy 4 psychology 5
issue 1 occur 1 publication 7
item 2 odd 10 publish 3
job 4 offset 8 purchase 2
journal 2 ongoing 10 pursue 5
justify 3 option 4 qualitative 9
label 4 orient 5 quote 7
labour 1 outcome 3 radical 8
layer 3 output 4 random 8
lecture 6 overall 4 range 2
legal 1 overlap 9 ratio 5
legislate 1 overseas 6 rational 6
levy 10 panel 10 react 3
liberal 5 paradigm 7 recover 6
licence 5 paragraph 8 refine 9
likewise 10 parallel 4 regime 4
link 3 parameter 4 region 2
locate 3 participate 2 register 3
logic 5 partner 3 regulate 2
maintain 2 passive 9 reinforce 8
major 1 perceive 2 reject 5
mallipulate 8 percent 1 relax 9
manual 9 period 1 release 7
margin 5 persist 2 10 relevant
mature 9 perspective 5 reluctance 10
maximise 3 phase 4 rely 3
mechanism 4 phenomenon 7 remove 3
media 7 philosophy 3 require 1
mediate 9 physical 3 research 1
medical 5 plus 8 reside 2
medium 9 policy 1 resolve 4
mental 5 portion 9 resource 2
method 1 pose 10 respond 1
migrate 6 positive 2 restore 8
military 9 potential 2 restrain 9
minimal 9 practitioner 8 restrict 2

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 retain 4 status 4 thesis 7
reveal 6 straightforward 10 topic 7
revenue 5 strategy 2 trace 6
reverse 7 stress 4 tradition 2
revise 8 structure 1 transfer 2
revolution 9 style 5 transform 6
rigid 9 submit 7 transit 5
role 1 subordinate 9 transmit 7
route 9 subsequent 4 transport 6
scenario 9 subsidy 6 trend 5
schedule 8 substitute 5 trigger 9
scheme 3 successor 7 ultimate 7
scope 6 sufficient 3 undergo 10
section 1 sum 4 underlie 6
sector 1 summary 4 undertake 4
secure 2 supplement 9 uniform 8
seek 2 survey 2 unify 9
select 2 survive 7 unique 7
sequence 3 suspend 9 utilise 6
series 4 sustain 5 valid 3
sex 3 symbol 5 vary 1
shift 3 tape 6 vehicle 8
significant 1 target 5 version 5
similar 1 task 3 via 8
simulate 7 team 9 violate 9
site 2 technical 3 virtual 8
so-called 10 technique 3 visible 7
sole 7 technology 3 vision 9
somewhat 7 temporary 9 visual 8
source 1 tense 8 volume 3
specific 1 terminate 8 voluntary 7
specify 3 text 2 welfare 5
sphere 9 theme 8 whereas 5
stable 5 theory 1 whereby 10
statistic 4 thereby 8 widespread 8

APPENDIX B

Sample Texts From the Academic Corpus3

Text From the Commerce Subcorpus (Buckle, Kim, & Hall, 199
DATING NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS CYCLES

I. Introduction

Dating the turning points and duration of business cycles has long been assoc
construction of aggregate reference cycle indexes, and their associated leading,
lagging indicators. This was along lines originally developed by Burns and Mitch
subsequently by colleagues at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NB
(1990). More recently, identifying the turning points and duration of business c
an important aspect of two further areas of business cycle research: the evaluation
and associated empirical business cycle models, e.g. King and Plosser (1994), Sim
and the analysis of the time varying characteristics of business cycles, e.g
Rudebusch (1992), Watson (1994).

3 Words in the Academic Word List are underlined.

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 The Burns and Mitchell technique of dating business cycles relied primarily on two sorts of
information: the descriptive evidence from business publications and general business condi-
tions indices, and the "specific cycles" found in many individual series and the tendency for
turning points to sometimes cluster at certain dates. Based on this information, a set of
reference cycle dates were selected that specified the turning points in "aggregate economic
activity". A key feature of the Burns and Mitchell approach was to focus on the amount of
cyclical co-movement or coherence among a large number of economic variables. This co-
movement is the prime characteristic of their definition of the business cycle: ". .. a cycle
consists of expansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, followed
by similarly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which merge into the expansion phase
of the next cycle; ... in duration business cycles vary from more than one year to ten or twelve
years .. ." (Burns and Mitchell, 1946, p 3).
The NBER approach is based on the view that there is no unique way of combining all these
activities, and accordingly the business cycle cannot be fully depicted by a single measure, e.g.
Burns (1969, p 13). Burns and Mitchell, and subsequent NBER researchers, intended therefore,
before the computer age, to provide a standard technique with a set of decision rules for
deriving business cycle turning points based on these two sorts of information. In practice, this
involved the application of a standard format of filtering procedures to extract the turning
points in each data series, and then combining this information in a judgemental way to
determine a single turning point date. Other procedures, notably reference cycle indexes and
coincident indexes, subsequently emerged as supplementary procedures for combining a large
number of data series including various measures of output, production inputs, price series,
monetary aggregates, etc, into a single composite index which have also been used to identify
turning points.

Text From the Science Subcorpus (Daugherty, 1997)

Transmission Genetics

Gregor Mendel's experiments, described in Chapter 4, are models of scientific

Mendel reported his studies on the inheritance of seven different characteristics of
by following the transmission of these traits from parent to offspring. Although
nothing of the chemical nature of genes, Mendel was able to describe aspects of their
quite accurately. These principles became the starting point of the new science. The
transmission of single genes and traits is sometimes called Mendelian genetics. The
six principles reflect contemporary concepts in transmission genetics.
1. Inheritance is the transmission of traits and characteristics from one generation to the
next. In his experiments, Mendel showed that some simple traits are governe
effects of two factors, one inherited from each parent. We now call these factors
2. Differing chemical forms of a gene that govern a single function or trait are call
One allele of each gene is carried by each egg and each sperm that unite to for
individual. Thus, a newly fertilized egg, or zygote, will contain a complete set
alleles that governs the development of the traits of the new individual. Somet
wordc gene and allele are used interchangeably. Individuals who have two identi
of a gene are said to be homozygous. Individuals who have different alleles of a
heterozygous.
3. All of the genes (or alleles) that an individual has are called the genotype or the genome of
that person. Genotype may also refer to the pair of alleles, one derived from each parent,
that govern a single trait.
4. Characteristics of an individual, singly or collectively, are called the phenotype of the
person (figure 1.6a). The phenotype results from genes being expressed in a particular
environment. Distinguishing the effects of the genes from the effects of the environment
in determining the phenotype has proven to be extremely difficult.
5. The two alleles that govern a single trait may interact. Sometimes, one allele is expressed,
and the other is not. In such a case, the allele that is expressed is said to be dominant to
the recessive allele which is not expressed. Alleles that are both expressed are said to be
co-dominant.

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 6. Mendelian rules govern inheritance not only in pea plants, but also humans, other
animals, and plants. Mendelian mechanisms of inheritance are shared by virtually all
higher organisms. Simpler, single-celled organisms such as bacteria do not follow
Mendelian patterns of inheritance. Bacterial genes occur singly rather than in pairs.
Cytogenetics
Mendel based his ideas on experimental results using whole plants. Quite independently,
biologists analyzed the structure of cells and their components microscopically. By 1903, the
basic stages of cell division had also been identified, and genes were known to occur on
chromosomes. The exciting result was that the behavior of chromosomes found in the nucleus
of a cell could explain many of Mendel's findings. Cytogenetics is the study of the structure and
function of chromosomes, and of cells during division.
7. Genes occupy segments of chromosomes, dark-staining bodies that occur in the nucleus of
cells. Chromosomes (figure 1.7) are usually visible only during, or immediately before,
cell division. The precise site that a gene occupies on a chromosome is called a genetic
locus. In Mendelian terms, a genetic locus on a chromosome is occupied by an allele.

Text From the Arts Subcorpus (Kidman, 1995)

OVERVIEW

The American educator Maxine Greene (1984) has written of the relationsh
students and teachers:

There is a danger in the tendency to disconfirm their experiences and respon

because they do not participate in what we believe to be "literate" discourse and be
they often do not value what we take for granted to be valuable. (p. 293)
Some students believed that the discourses which allow academics within a discipline t
to one another, or in communicating primarily through 'professional' categories
stories or identities of the speakers can become hidden. Some believed that the construc
academic discourses provides teachers with elaborate languages which allow a de
intellectual and personal concealment. One student said, "I get lost in the jargon,
converse here at the University or share our common understandings. We swop
principles and call it an education". Maori students who have come to the University
new understandings or who wish to combine their own cultural knowledge with
meanings sometimes find that the patterns of academic discourse inhibits them from
the words for their own lived experiences. The 'human' face of learning, described by
student seems to disappear in the sea of faces, making communication uneasy or
values difficult to identify.
Part of this distancing effect also lies in the physical layout of the University
classrooms. The immoveable rows of seats in the larger lecture theatres are not conduci
development of interactive learning environments. Some lecturers continue to give
without the aid of media in the belief that their ancient lecture notes and measured tones of
authority will motivate 150 or 300 recently enrolled First Years to investigate a subject fur
a later date. In spite of this however, several students had attended lectures where sta
altered this traditional approach to large group teaching and, despite the problems wit
layout and class size, had provided interactive instruction which the students remembe
enjoyed.
Small group or tutorial situations were a greatly preferred style of teaching. Several students
mentioned that they initially lacked confidence in speaking before people they didn't know, but
they had gained a sense of self assurance over their time at the University and most of them used
tutorials to "bounce ideas off other students". Furthermore, some students had extended the
study group approach independently and had formed informal, self-led study groups with o
Maori students. These groups hold particular significance in contributing to the info
rhythms of university life. They facilitate the development of strong networks among M
students, and they also provide support for students who have knowledge of their own cultu
and who wish to enter the 'deep' structures of learning. For those students competing ag
the pressures of university study, the commitment to adopt 'deep' approaches to their learn
can be swayed by external factors, such as departmental ethos, teaching methodologies an

A NEW ACADEMIC WORD LIST 237

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overabundance of unconnected information. The desire to create knowledge from a quantity of
information may be in part satisfied by students who participate in self-directed study groups.
Here, it may be possible for the university to lend its support to those students who are taking
the time to extract an understanding of intellectual processes alongside the demand to keep
producing essays and degrees.

Text From Law Subcorpus (Miller, 1997)

ACTIONS FOR DAMAGES FOR PERSONAL INJURY IN NEW ZEALAND
Introduction

This chapter is published as a supplement to Brooker's "Accident Compensation

Zealand". It is intended to direct the attention of persons advising accident victims to th
to explore the possibility of bringing common law actions for damages in appro
circumstances. Clearly the topic cannot be covered comprehensively in a chapter of t
but attention is drawn to the more obvious cases where it would appear common law
might be available in New Zealand Courts. Readers may also wish to refer to the fol
recent material, R Harrison, Matters of Life and Death, Legal Research Foundation No
Auckland, 1993; S Todd and J Black, Accident Compensation and the Barring of Acti
Damages (1993) 2 Tort Law Review 197
1. Statutory Compensation or damages?
The lawyers duty
1.1 Because of the limited compensation available under the ARCI Act, lawyers and
who advise persons on their rights arising out of personal injury, should not limit their
to attempting to prove that the injury is covered by the Act. They have a duty to look f
of showing that the ARCI Act does not apply to the injuries.
1.2 In order to ensure that the client receives the maximum benefits available, it is the l
duty when advising a person who has suffered personal injury, to explore the possibility
action for common law damages. Neglecting to explore this option may amount to profes
negligence on the part of a barrister or solicitor. (see Keys v. St. L Reeves A55/85 H
Plymouth 13th April 1992, Smellie J.)
Limited prohibition against suing
1.3 Apart from the actions for loss of consortium and loss of services, the A
Compensation legislation has never removed the common law right of action for dam
personal injury in New Zealand. Section 5 of the 1972, and s27 of the 1982 A
Compensation Acts, prevented the bringing of proceedings for damages in a New
Court, but there was no prohibition against common law proceedings in a Court outs
Zealand in respect of personal injury suffered in New Zealand. Nor, apart from the two
mentioned beforehand, did the legislation remove the common law right where a ca
action arose in New Zealand. It imposed a procedural bar to suing in a New Zealand C
recover compensatory damages. It was however, possible to sue for "exemplary" or p
damages (see Donselaar v Donselaar [1982] 1 NZLR 87 and Auckland City Council v
[1986] 1 NZLR 732(CA)).
1.4 In common with the previous legislation, s14 of the ARCI Act 1992, prohibits the br
in any New Zealand Court of proceedings for damages arising directly or indirectly
personal injury covered by the Act or personal injury by accident covered by the 1972 o
Accident Compensation Acts. Like its predecessors the prohibition in s 14 does not a
exemplary or punitive damages.

238 TESOL QUARTERLY

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