A new Academic Vocabulary List

Academic Vocabulary Lists

The Academic Vocabulary Lists (AVL) is new and is different to the The Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) that many teachers of academic English will be familiar with. How is it different? The authors state that that the Coxhead list has been a very useful tool for teachers and learners since it was released in 2000 but the AVL is an improvement / development. The authors give four reasons why they believe the AVL is better. They are as follows;

1. The AWL uses an older and smaller corpus of 3.5 million words. The new AVL uses text from as recent as 2011 and draws on a corpus of 120 million words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
2. The 570 words in Coxhead's AWL represents 7.2% of the words in the COCA Academic texts.  The AVL top 570 words represent 14% of the COCA words in the Academic texts. The AVL is also oriented to academic texts rather than texts on more general subjects.
3. The AVL is more useable as the AVL data is available in different formats. Users can look at the 3,500 top words or they can look at the top words sorted by academic genre. There are nine academic genres in the AVL;

• History
• Social Science
• Science & Technology
• Education
• Humanities
• Medecine & Health
• Law & Political Science
• Philosophy, Religion & Psychology
• Business & Finance

The words are grouped by lemma so that a word such as decide (the lemma) also has other entries such as decided- deciding and the part of speech is provided.  The words are also colour coded so that yellow means academic words, red equals more technical words, blue is high frequency words that are not academic and grey represents words that are low frequency but not academic. The example below shows that study is used more as a noun than as a verb in academic contexts, study as a verb is high frequency in general English and that studying is used especially in the Education genre.

example of word family from the list

4. The AVL is also linked to COCA. This means that it is possible to search the corpus and retrieve lots of information that is provided about words in the AVL. For example, meaning and useage is covered in depth and users can see which academic genre the word is most frequently used in.

As the AVL is linked to COCA it is also possible to do a search of any text by copying and pasting it into the search box at COCA. The results analyse the text and show which words are in the AVL.

AVL homepage
http://www.academicwords.info/x.asp

Copy & paste text to search COCA
http://www.wordandphrase.info/academic/analyzeText.asp

This is a fantastic resource for teachers of academic English and is most certainly worth exploring.  Highly recommended. A while back I wrote the following - Be careful though as at the moment every 5th word is missing which is very irritating. The full list will be avaiable "in a few months". The authors have been true to their word and the full list (including those missing fifth words) of words is now available.

Thanks to Mark Davies and Dee Gardner at BYU.

It is now possible to download the lists as Word or Excel files. Three lists are available;
Word families - similar to the AWL in presentation
Academic core - the top 3,000 lemma
All coca-Academic - the20,000 most frequent lemma

To get the lists the user must enter their name and an email address and tick a box promising not to use the materials for commercial purposes. The authors have also added the following rider:

"Note: please do not place these lists on another website -- even for student use. Just link to our site so that other people can download the files for themselves. Thanks".