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The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. Edited by DANA FERRIS University of California, Davis
The Academic Word List 10 Years On: Research and Teaching Implications
AVERIL COXHEAD Victoria University of Wellington Wellington, New Zealand doi: 10.5054/tq.2011.254528
List (Coxhead, 2000; reprinted in Teubert & Krishnamurthy, 2007). The AWL is now widely used in English for academic purposes (EAP) classrooms in many countries, in a wide range of materials, in vocabulary tests, and as a major resource for researchers. In this article I reflect on the impact of the Academic Word List (AWL) by looking at commonly asked questions about the list: What is the AWL? Is the AWL useful/ adequate for a range of learners needs? How can I help students learn academic vocabulary? What materials using the AWL are available? And finally, When are you going to update the AWL?
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possible. It contained textbooks, articles, book chapters, and laboratory manuals. The main aim was that these materials should represent, as much as possible, the reading of first-year students at a university (Coxhead, 1998, 2000). Four key principles guided the selection of words for the AWL. First, the 2,000 most frequent word families of Wests (1953) General Service List of English Words (GSL) would not be included in the count. This decision was made because the purpose of the AWL was not general English but specifically academic vocabulary. It was a controversial decision, because the GSL has been criticized for its age. The GSL is yet to be replaced. The three other selection principles were frequency, range, and uniformity. The word families had to occur 100 times or more in each of the four disciplines of the corpus (frequency), in 15 or more of the subject areas (range), and over 10 times in the four disciplines (uniformity). The AWL is divided into 10 sublists. The first sublist contains the 60 most frequent word families in the AWL, the second sublist contains the next 60 most frequent word families, and so on. Coxhead (n.d.) has the headwords and sublists of the AWL.
TABLE 1 Studies Investigating AWL Distribution in Texts Number of running words 3.5 million 1 million 14, 283 3,292,600 Percent coverage of the AWL 1.4 4.5 11.60 10.6
Study
Corpus
Coxhead (2000a, Fiction 2000b) Coxhead (unreported) Newspapers Cobb & Horst (2004) Learned section of the Brown corpus (Francis & Kucera, 1979) Hyland & Tse (2007) Sciences, engineering, and social sciences, written by professional and student writers Chen & Ge (2007) Medical research articles Konstantakis (2007) Business Coxhead & Hirsh Science (2007) Ward (2009) Engineering Martnez, Beck, & Agricultural sciences Panza (2009) research articles Vongpumivitch, Applied linguistics Huang, & Chang research papers (2009) Li & Qian (2010) Finance Coxhead, Stevens, & Pathway series of secondTinkle (2010) ary science textbooks
190,425 1 million 1.5 million 271,000 826,416 1.5 million 6.3 million 279,733
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On average, the AWL covers 10% of the vocabulary in the written academic corpus it was based on. Table 1 documents the coverage of the AWL in a number of corpus-based studies over the last 10 years. Table 1 illustrates how the nature of a corpus can impact the coverage of the AWL. In these studies, most, if not all, the AWL word families appear. Note that the coverage figures of AWL over the various university-level corpora are consistently around 10%.
Another use for the AWL is in testing. The Vocabulary Levels Test contains a section using the AWL (see Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001; Coxhead, 2006; Nation, 2001; Schmitt, 2010). Other more pedagogically oriented work, such as Murphy and Kandil (2004), looks at the AWL and pronunciation. In learner corpora research, we see a call from Paquot (2007) for an AWL that is more productively oriented, based on the language that learners themselves produce. For more on the AWL in the context of other vocabulary research, see Nation and Webb (2010) and Schmitt (2010).
Secondary school teachers also often report AWL words occurring frequently in secondary school textbooks. So far, as we saw in Table 1, the majority of research using the AWL has been carried out using university-level texts. Coxhead, Stevens, and Tinkle (2010) suggested that secondary school science texts contain more high-frequency words and are therefore more reader friendly than university-level texts. Despite this level of high-frequency words, students need a very large vocabulary to read secondary school science texts. A great deal more research needs to be carried out with different corpora.
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The creation of one list, as we see with the AWL, has an impact on other lists that are based on it. To conclude, 10 years on, I can honestly say that the AWL has had a far greater and more international impact that I ever imagined back in 1998.
THE AUTHOR
Averil Coxhead is a senior lecturer in applied linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. She is interested in many aspects of second language lexical studies, including corpus linguistics and EAP, vocabulary use in writing, classroom tasks, vocabulary list development and evaluation, phraseology, and pedagogical approaches to lexis. Her current research projects include vocabulary size measurements, vocabulary teaching and learning in secondary schools, and the collocations and phraseology of the AWL in written texts.
REFERENCES
Bauer, L., & Nation, I. S. P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexicography, 6, 253279. doi:10.1093/ijl/6.4.253. Chen, Q., & Ge, C. (2007). A corpus-based lexical study on frequency and distribution of Coxheads AWL word families in medical research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 26, 502514. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2007.04.003. Chung, T. (2009). The newspaper word list: A specialised vocabulary for reading newspapers. JALT Journal, 31(2), 159182. Cobb, T. (n.d.). The compleat lexical tutor. Retrieved from http://www.lextutor.ca/ on 22 September 2010. Cobb, T., & Horst, M. (2004). Is there room for an AWL in French? In P. Bogaards & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language: Selection, acquisition, and testing (pp. 1538). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. Coxhead, A. (1998). The development and evaluation of an academic word list. (Unpublished MA thesis). Victoria University, Wellington, Australia Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213 238(Reprinted: Critical concepts in linguistics, pp. 123149, in Corpus linguistics by W. Teubert and R. Krishnamurthy, Eds., 2007, Oxford, England: Routledge) Coxhead, A. (2002a). The academic word list: A corpus-based word list for academic purposes. In B. Ketteman and G. Marks (Eds.), Teaching and language corpora (TALC) 2000 conference proceedings. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Coxhead, A. (2002b). Academic writing help pages. In M. Rundell (Ed.), Macmillan English dictionary (pp. LA4 A7). London, England: Macmillan. Coxhead, A. (2006). Essentials of teaching academic vocabulary. Boston, MA: Heinle Cengage. Coxhead, A. (2011). Specialised vocabulary in secondary classrooms: Teachers perspectives. Manuscript submitted for publication. Coxhead, A. (n.d.). The academic word list. Retrieved from http://www.victoria.ac. nz/lals/staff/averil-coxhead.aspx. Coxhead, A., & Byrd, P. (2007). Preparing writing teachers to teach the vocabulary and grammar of academic prose. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 129147. doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2007.07.002. Coxhead, A., & Hirsh, D. (2007). A pilot science word list for EAP. Revue Francaise de linguistique appliquee, XII (2) 6578.
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Coxhead, A., Stevens, L., & Tinkle, J. (2010). Why might secondary science textbooks be difficult to read? New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics, 16(2), 3552. Francis, W. N., and Kucera, H. (1979). A standard corpus of present-day edited American English, for use with digital computers. Providence, RI: Department of Linguistics, Brown University. Gillett, A. (n.d.). Using English for academic purposes. Retrieved from http://www. uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm. Haywood, S. (n.d.-a). The academic word list gapmaker. Retrieved from http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/,alzsh3/acvocab/awlgapmaker.htm. Haywood, S. (n.d.-b). The academic word list highlighter. Retrieved from http:// www.nottingham.ac.uk/,alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm. Hirsh, D., & Coxhead, A. (2009). Ten ways of focussing on science-specific vocabulary in EAP. English Australia Journal, 25(1), 516. Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2007). Is there an "academic vocabulary"? TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 235253. Konstantakis, N. (2007). Creating a business word list for teaching business English. Elia, 7, 79102. Li, Y., & Qian, D. (2010). Profiling the academic word list (AWL) in a financial corpus. System, 38, 402411. doi:10.1016/j.system.2010.06.015. Luton, G. (n.d.). Vocabulary exercises for the academic word list. Retrieved from http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com/ Martnez, I., Beck, S., & Panza, C. (2009). Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 28, 183198. doi:10.1016/ j.esp.2009.04.003. Murphy, J., & Kandil, M. (2004). Word-level stress patterns in the academic word list. System, 32(1), 6174. doi:10.1016/j.system.2003.06.001. Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Learning vocabulary in lexical sets: Dangers and guidelines. TESL Journal, 9(2), 610. Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Nation, I. S. P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 213. doi:10.2167/illt039.0. Nation, I. S. P., & Webb, S. (2010). Researching and analyzing vocabulary. Boston, MA: Heinle Cengage. Nuttall, G. (n.d.). Vocabulary exercises for the academic word list. Retrieved from http://web.scc.losrios.edu/nuttalg/vocabularyresources Paquot, M. (2007). Towards a productively-oriented academic word list. In J. Walinski, K. Kredens, & S. Gozdz-Roszkowski (Eds.), Corpora and ICT in language studies. PALC 2005 [Lodz Studies in Language 13], (pp. 127140). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching vocabulary. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2005). Focus on vocabulary. New York, NY: Longman. Schmitt, N., Schmitt, D., & Clapham, C. (2001). Developing and exploring the behaviour of two new versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test. Language Testing, 18(1), 5588. Vongpumivitch, V., Huang, J., & Chang, Y. (2009). Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research papers. English for Specific Purposes, 28(1), 3341. doi:10.1016/ j.esp.2008.08.003. Wang, J., Liang, S., & Ge, G. (2008). Establishment of a medical academic word list. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 442458. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2008.05.003.
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Ward, J. (2009). A basic engineering English word list for less proficient foundation engineering undergraduates. English for Specific Purposes, 28, 170182. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.001. West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London, England: Longman, Green.
& English language learners face a debilitating lexical gap between the
words they know and the words they need to know. Although educated native speakers of English know approximately 20,000 word families (Nation, 2001), or roughly 70,000 words, one estimate of ELLs lexical needs is approximately 2,000 words to maintain conversations, 5,000 to read authentic texts, and perhaps 10,000 to comprehend challenging academic materials (Schmitt, 2000). Unfortunately, even well-educated ELLs may know less than a quarter of their native counterparts vocabulary (Laufer & Yano, 2001). Within the last 15 years, this lexical gap has prompted a number of useful studies addressing issues relevant to both learners and teachers. Though much of this work has investigated reading (e.g., Cobb, 2008), lexical knowledge impacts all skill areas, including writing (Engber, 1995; Ferris, 1994), listening (Chang, 2007), and speaking (Joe, 1998). The purpose of this short article is to present several teaching applications from the current body of L2 vocabulary research. This information focuses on four key pedagogical questions. (Readers interested in research details should see the timeline of influential L2 vocabulary studies of vocabulary acquisition presented by Laufer [2009], the review of extant research on vocabulary instruction by Schmitt [2008], and the extensive vocabulary bibliography by year or topic at the Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group Archive [2011] at http://www.lognostics.co.uk/varga/.)
PEDAGOGICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT L2 VOCABULARY RESEARCH 1. Why Should Teachers Teach Vocabulary?
Native speakers do not learn most of their vocabulary through explicit instruction, so common wisdom in TESOL pedagogy has favored a
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