What is the Academic Word List, why is it important, and how does it work?

1. What is the
AWL and why
Is It
Important?
Adapted from Teaching the Academic Word List by
Advance Consulting for Education
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d18zQs0lV9c&t=500s

2. The Academic Word List (AWL)
– Developed in 2000 by Avril Coxhead in New Zealand at the Victory University of
Wellington.
– She discovered that there words that are crucial to being successful in college.
Students who did not know what these words mean generally did not do well in
college.
– Researchers analyzed over 3.5 millions words in academic texts (textbooks, journals,
lab manuals, and course notes).
– She made a list of 570 of the most frequently used words in English in an academic
context
– Words used in all disciplines
– Not words that are very specific to a field (no jargon)
– For example: innovation (used in history, science, nursing, …)
– But not: subnet mask (a term used in computer engineering technology)

3. Headwords
– The 570 words on the AWL are all headwords
– A headword is the main word of the head family
– For example, the first word of the AWL is analyze
– Other members of the analyze family are: analytic, analytical, analysis, analyst,
analyzer
– The words are in order of how common they are and divided in sublists. This
means that the 60 words in sublist 1 are the most common words. The 60
words on sublist 2 are the next most common words.

4. How Does It Work?
1. Knowing the definition is important
– Knowing the definition is not enough
– Words need to be learned in a context.
– We need context to make meaning of things.
– We need context for information to be stored in the brain.
– That means we need to learn these words by reading (or hearing) them in a text
2. Need to learn collocations.
– When learning the word analysis, also learn words like market analysis, data analysis,
chemical analysis, system analysis because the word analysis often goes with
(collates) these others in an academic context

5. How Does It Work?
3. Learn all the words in the word family (the related words in different parts of
speech)
4. Do it a little bit at the time - you will not learn all 570 word this week or even in
this course!
5. Recycle words: our brain needs to see a word in 10 different contexts to learn it
6. Use words in real contexts – this means that you will need to make your own
sentences using these words
DO NOT JUST MEMORIZE THE AWL – THAT DOES
NOT WORK!!