|
[ AWL on the web ] [ Exercises ]
| | Academic Word list – sub-technical vocabulary
The Academic Word List (AWL), is a list of 570 word families that constitute
approximately 10% of academic prose. A word family is the set of words around a
base word including its conjugation or declension plus words formed with
prefixes and suffices. For example, the WF of assign is:
assign, assigns, assigned, assigning,
reassign, reassigns, reassigned, reassigning,
unassign, unassigns, unassigned, unassigning,
assignment, assignments, reassignment, reassignment
Note: links to everything
mentioned here are on the following page.
Background
The list was created by Averil Coxhead in 2000 using her own corpus of
academic texts. A corpus these days generally refers to a database of texts that
can be searched and analysed, often to reveal patterns in the language that are
known subconsciously. And once we have access to patterns, we have the basis of
teaching material.
As far back as 1953, Michael West manually devised the well-established General
Service List which comprises the 2,000 “most useful” word families of English
vocabulary. The first thousand words of the GSL, in order of frequency, cover
over 70% of Coxhead’s academic corpus. The second thousand covers only about 5%
of her corpus. This means that about three-quarters of any academic text is
going to consists of the most frequently occurring 2,000 words in English.
The principles for inclusion in the AWL were statistically based. Coxhead
ensured that her academic corpus was populated with texts from a balanced range
of disciplines, that the items occurred in significant numbers and were spread
across the disciplines. Words were not included if (1) they did not meet these
criteria, (2) were in the GSL or (3) were proper nouns.
It is reasonable to expect that non-native speakers operating in academic
spheres are familiar with the vocabulary that is on the GSL, and the terms of
their field. Terminology typically covered about 14% of her corpus. It is the
10% in-between, i.e. the academic word list of sub-technical vocabulary, that
therefore needs the most pro-active teaching.
Coxhead subdivided her list of 570 word families into ten groups according to
frequency to aid in the sequencing of teaching and in materials development.
These sublists are available from the AWL website, and are reflected in most
related teaching resources.
In 1997, Adam Kilgarriff (University of Brighton – at the time) produced a list
of the all the lemmas that occur more than 800 times in the 100-million word
British National Corpus of general English. There are 6,318 of them. It used to
be called “6000 Words You Really Need to Know”. Almost all AWL verbs and their
word families occur in this list. Therefore studying the AWL vocabulary
contributes to the learner’s general English.
Teaching Vocabulary
As indicated above, the definition of a word family only includes the
morphological process of derivation and compounding, but not any multi-word
units such as compound nouns, delexical verbs, important discourse phrases such
as for instance, in brief, prior to, etc.
Most existing teaching material reinforces a passive knowledge of the AWL
vocabulary. But when learning vocabulary, students need to be aware of the
word’s context (domain), connotation, collocation and colligation in order to
have active use of it.
For example, when learning the verb fluctuate, it is necessary to know the
colligations:
fluctuate + between + noun + and + noun
fluctuate + from + noun + to + noun.
And the strong collocation fluctuate wildly.
It is therefore recommended that students consult a corpus to observe these
features for themselves as this will involve learning about vocabulary learning
and has the pedagogical advantages of discovery learning. See the Word Sketch
Engine on the following page..
For my own Master thesis, I produced a catalogue of the verbs on the AWL with
all of their grammar patterns, which is intended as foundation data to create
resources that aim to make this vocabulary active. The catalogue is available on
request, and it is hoped that it will available on line in the near future.
Finally, it was pointed out at the TALC conference (Paris 2006) that 570 word
families is too great a number of items for students to have to deal with. By
applying certain criteria, a more manageable list is currently being produced.
For this, we shall have to wait.
Next page
|