Reflecting on Coxhead (2000), “A New

Academic Word List”

AVERIL COXHEAD
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand

doi: 10.1002/tesq.287

I n my 2000 TESOL Quarterly article “A New Academic Word List”

(Coxhead, 2000), I reported on the corpus-based development and
evaluation of the Academic Word List (AWL). Since publication, the
AWL has become widely known and used by teachers, researchers,
learners, materials designers, textbook publishers, dictionary makers,
and website and app designers. In this brief reflection, I look at the
durability and contribution of Coxhead (2000) to the fields of vocabu-
lary studies, corpus linguistics, teaching English to speakers of other
languages (TESOL), English for academic purposes (EAP), and Eng-
lish for specific purposes (ESP) and its influence on recent research
in academic vocabulary.
The AWL research arose from earlier work by Paul Nation at Victo-
ria University of Wellington on the University Word List (UWL) (Xue
& Nation, 1984). In contrast to the UWL, the AWL was developed
using a written academic corpus, validated on a second academic cor-
pus, and contrasted with general English in another corpus. The three
corpora were developed using corpus linguistics principles from
researchers such as Sinclair (1991). The needs of learners and teach-
ers in TESOL, EAP, and ESP were paramount in the study, because
the ultimate aim was to create a tool to guide decisions around learn-
ing, teaching, and curriculum and materials design. The AWL was
quickly picked up in research in a field that was rapidly expanding
and gaining momentum. Nation (2001) was the first major volume on
vocabulary studies and it included sections on the AWL. In the same
year, Coxhead and Nation’s (2001) specialised vocabulary appeared in
a volume on research in EAP, and Schmitt, Schmitt, and Clapham
(2001) included the AWL in their versions of the widely known Vocab-
ulary Levels Test.
Another reason the AWL has endured is that researchers have
focused on whether word lists can provide a shortcut to helping learn-
ers develop their vocabulary knowledge in a second language. Having

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© 2015 TESOL International Association
a large vocabulary in a second language is an important goal for lan-
guage learners, after all (Nation, 2013). Research on the AWL itself
includes, for example, Dang and Webb’s (2014) analysis of the AWL
in spoken academic texts, Wang and Nation’s (2004) investigation of
homonymy in the AWL, and Murphy and Kandil’s (2004) study of
word-level stress patterns in the list. The AWL has been used as the
basis for developing other word lists (Coxhead, 2011), such as the EAP
Science List by Coxhead and Hirsh (2007) and the Middle School
Lists (see Greene & Coxhead, 2015). See Coxhead (2016) for more on
identifying and acquiring academic and disciplinary vocabulary, and
on word lists for specific purposes.
Many of the principles which were developed for creating the AWL
can be seen in Nation and Webb’s (2011) list of “steps involved in
making a word list” (p. 135). These principles can also be seen in the
selection criteria in Gardner and Davies’s (2014) New Academic
Vocabulary List, which is based on an enormous corpus of 425 million
words (Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA). These
researchers expanded on the principles of selection of items for their
list, which is an indication of how the field is evolving. Their particu-
larly impressive website (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) allows anyone
to search the corpus and download it. A second New Academic Word
List, this time by Browne, Culligan, and Phillips (n.d.–a), is another
example of developments in the academic word list arena. The AWL
used West’s (1953) General Service List of English Words (GSL) as a
way to represent high-frequency items that learners who are planning
to study at university in an English-medium context should know
before moving on to academic vocabulary. Recent work in this area of
high-frequency vocabulary includes Nation’s (2006) British National
Corpus (BNC) and BNC/COCA frequency word lists (see http://
www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation for more information
and these lists), and two new GSLs: one by Brezina and Gablasova
(2015) and another by Browne, Culligan, and Phillips (n.d.–b). These
lists are examples of research moving forward in the area of general
vocabulary. Research into these words lists is ongoing.
Academic vocabulary has been investigated in many ways since the
publication of the AWL study. Hyland and Tse (2007) consider the
question of whether there is a core academic vocabulary, and develop
a corpus to investigate the behaviour of AWL words in context in pro-
fessional and student writing across academic disciplines. Paquot
(2007) used learner corpora data to investigate academic vocabulary in
writing, and Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) used the AWL as inspira-
tion for their study of academic formulas. Durrant’s (2014) recent
work investigates patterns of vocabulary in texts across disciplines.

182 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Nation (2011, p. 534) states that “the most obvious reasons for the
widespread use of the Academic Word List are that it is a resource that is
immediately applicable and that Coxhead made the list freely available
in a variety of formats.” The AWL has been freely available online and
downloadable with information on learning for a long time and is cur-
rently at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/.
Corpus tools for AWL analysis are now much more readily available
thanks to the work of scholars such as Tom Cobb with his Compleat Lex-
ical Tutor (http://www.lextutor.ca/) and Heatley, Nation, and Cox-
head’s (2002) Range Programme (downloadable from http://
www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation). These free online
tools mean that researchers, teachers, and learners can develop their
own corpora and use the analysis to shape their own word list develop-
ment for vocabulary learning and teaching. Sandra Haywood’s websites
(n.d.–a, n.d.–b), the AWL Gapmaker and the AWL Highlighter, allow
teachers and learners to analyse their own texts in relation to the AWL.
These kinds of tools for analysis have modelled how vocabulary research
can be adapted and adopted online to support language learners and
teachers.
Much more work remains to be done in vocabulary studies and
EAP/ESP. My own research interests have stayed within the areas of
EAP and ESP vocabulary but have looked at learner and teacher fac-
tors affecting word use in writing, phraseology, vocabulary size testing,
and specialised vocabulary. Current research projects include the size
and nature of vocabulary of the trades (plumbing, carpentry, fabrica-
tion, and automotive engineering), vocabulary in international school
settings, and vocabulary in secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zeal-
and. Learners, teachers, and researchers need to know more about the
behaviour of academic words and phrases in academic texts, both spo-
ken and written. We also need to know more about how learners and
teachers can address the challenge of bringing vocabulary research
into their classrooms (Byrd & Coxhead, 2010). There is no doubt,
however, that we know much more about the nature of academic
vocabulary than we did back in 2000.

THE AUTHOR
Averil Coxhead, senior lecturer, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Stu-
dies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has just published New Ways
in Teaching Vocabulary (Ed.) (TESOL, 2014) and Academic Vocabulary for Middle
School Students: Research-Based Lists and Strategies for Key Content Areas with Jennifer
Greene (Brookes, 2015). She is currently researching vocabulary for academic and
professional purposes.

REFLECTING ON THE AWL 183

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