Sublists

Sublist 1: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 1: Exercises

Sublist 2: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 2: Exercises

Sublist 3: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 3: Exercises

Sublist 4: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 4: Exercises

Sublist 5: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 5: Exercises

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Sublist 6: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 6: Exercises

Sublist 7: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 7: Exercises

Sublist 8: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 8: Exercises

Sublist 9: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 9: Exercises

Sublist 10: List of Words (click for definition)

Sublist 10: Exercises

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What is the Academic Word List?

The AWL is a list of words which appear with high frequency in English-language academic texts. The list was compiled by Averil Coxhead at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

The list contains 570 word families and is divided into 10 sublists. Sublist 1 consists of the 60 most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most frequently used words and so on. Each sublist contains 60 word families, except for sublist 10, which contains 30.

To find these words, an analysis was done of academic journals, textbooks, course workbooks, lab manuals, and course notes.
The list was compiled following an analysis of over 3,500,000 words of text.

The words selected for the AWL are words which occur frequently in a range of academic subjects, including the Arts (including history, psychology, sociology, etc.), Commerce (including economics, marketing, management, etc.), Law and the Sciences (including biology, computer science, mathematics, etc.). This means that the AWL is useful to all second-language learners who wish to study in an English-speaking institution no matter what their field of study. The AWL does not, however, include technical words which are specific to a given field. Nor does it contain words which are of general use and very high frequency.

Why should I learn it?

You will need to know this academic vocabulary if you want to study in an English-speaking college or university. In fact, because these words are so common, they are even useful to those who do not plan to go on to post-secondary study in English. These are words that you will frequently see in newspapers, magazines, and novels, and hear on television, movies or in conversation.

If you know the General Service List, or GSL, which is considered to contain the 2,000 most important words in basic English, and then learn the AWL, your understanding of the vocabulary found in academic texts will increase by 10%. This is important, because research shows that "if, instead of learning the Academic Word List, the learner had moved on to the third 1,000 most frequent words, instead of an additional 10% coverage there would only have been 4.3% extra coverage."
Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

The Exercises

This site contains 285 gap-fill exercises to review and recycle the general word families contained within the AWL. These exercises can be found on each Sublist page. Gap-fill exercises are an excellent way to recycle vocabulary through different contexts and can be used to broaden the student's understanding of the range of meaning of vocabulary. The online format of the exercises allows students to get immediate feedback on their answers. Students can work through five different exercises for each word family in the AWL. Many of these exercises include different derivations (parts of speech) for the given word. Students are encouraged to complete the exercises for a given level before proceeding to the next level.

Note to Teachers

All the vocabulary exercises on this website were created using Gerry's Vocabulary Teacher. This software is both PC and Mac compatible. Each exercise took about 2 minutes to make. Go to our website to download the demo. The program will allow you to quickly and easily review the AWL vocabulary in greater depth, including looking at the various derivations. It will also allow you to reinforce, review and test other non-AWL vocabulary which you have introduced in your English class. Again, students will benefit through review of target vocabulary in sentences in context, using gap-fill exercises such as those found on this website. In a matter of minutes you can create these exercises for use on your own website or as hard copy (paper documents) for classroom study and homework assignments.

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