What is the Academic Word List?
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570
word families that are commonly found in
academic texts. This list was selected by
examining a large corpus (or collection) of
written academic texts and selecting the
words that occurred:
1 In texts from all four academic faculty
sections: Arts, Commerce, Law and Science.
2 Over 100 times in the corpus overall.
3 At least 10 times in each academic
faculty section.
4 Outside the 2000 most frequent words
on Michael West’s General Service List
(GSL). The GSL includes everyday words
such as I, house and do.
These principles ensured that only words that
occurred reasonably frequently in a variety of
study areas were selected.
The AWL targets vocabulary that occurs most
often in written academic texts. These words
also occur in newspapers but not as often as they
do in textbooks. The AWL words appear even
less in fiction. If your focus is learning academic
vocabulary, you need to make sure you read
academic textbooks so that you encounter these