Academic Word List documents

The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Avril Coxhead for her MA thesis. She developed the AWL to help both teacher and learners of  Academic English studying on univesity programmes.

The list she produced contains the 570 most commonly used word families in Academic English. The families are divided into 10 sub-groups according to their frequency of use. Sub-list 1 contains the most commonly used words in Academic English, sub-list 2 the second most commonly used group of words and so on.

On the University of Wellington site it is possible to read about how the AWL was developed.

It is also possible to download a copy of the AWL Sublists document either as a text (.rtf) file or as an Acrobat (.pdf) document

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/information.aspx