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Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 174:1 (2023) ► pp.83–111

Evaluating multiword unit word lists for academic purposes

ORCID logo | Danang University of Foreign Language Studies
| Victoria University of Wellington

Word lists play a critical role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, and recent developments include lists of academic collocations (e.g., vast majority, ultimate goal). There is however still a gap in evaluating lists focusing on a similar group of lexis. This paper evaluates two lists of academic collocations by Ackermann and Chen (2013) and Lei and Liu (2018) using three different methods: applying an evaluation framework adapted from Nation (2016), comparing the lexical constituents, and analysing the lexical coverage. The evaluation results give implications for EAP teachers to select the list that best suits their needs. By modelling the practice of evaluating word lists, this study highlights the importance of this work and encourages similar attempts in wordlist development studies.

Keywords: English for Academic Purposes (EAP), academic collocations, lexical constituents comparison, lexical coverage comparison, evaluation framework
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Published lists of academic collocations and evaluation practice
    • Word lists of academic collocations
    • Evaluating word lists
    • Research questions
  • Methodology
    • The word lists
    • The independent corpora
    • Procedure
  • Findings and discussion
    • Applying Nation’s (2016) adapted framework to the ACL and the AECL
      • A.Target audience
      • B.Purpose
      • C.Number of items
      • D.Unit of counting
      • E.Corpora
      • F.Word selection principles
      • G.Manual checking
      • H.Ordering items
      • I.Validation
      • J.Self-criticism
      • K.Availability
    • Lexical constituent overlap between the ACL and the AECL
    • Coverage of the ACL and the AECL over the COCA Academic and Fiction corpora
    • Coverage of the ACL and the AECL’s most frequent lexical academic collocations over the COCA Academic
  • Pedagogical and research implications
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 11 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.21041.ngu
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