Somewhere between technical and general vocabulary are located those words which are used in formal academic
contexts with a high frequency across scientific disciplines (Farrell 1990). These are
referred to as academic vocabulary. Recent findings do not support the adequacy of a single academic wordlist which can equally
meet the needs of students of all disciplines (Durrant 2016), and this has inspired
researchers to develop wordlists specific to each discipline. Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics is a discipline which
often embraces a high number of non-English speaking students for whom it is a demanding task to engage in academic communication
without having access to a ready-made resource. In the present study, a 10,781,188-word corpus based on textbooks taught in
thirteen subject areas of this field was compiled. The corpus was characterized by a specified genre and time-span, and a large
representative scope. It was used to draw up a list of academic words (= terminology) for students of this field. The wordlist,
which is accompanied by a list of collocations, accounts for approximately 7.1% of the coverage in the corpus. The findings build
on the trend toward generation of field-specific academic wordlists, which have significant implications for students,
instructors, material developers and researchers.
2013 “Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL)–A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12 (4): 235–247.
Anthony, Laurence
2015TagAnt (Version 1.1.0) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from [URL]
Bahns, Jens, and Moira Eldaw
1993 “Should we teach EFL students collocations?” System 21 (1): 101–114.
Biber, Douglas
1993 “Representativeness in corpus design” Literary and linguistic computing 8 (4): 243–257.
Brezina, Vaclav, & Dana Gablasova
2015 “Is there a core general vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List.” Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 1–22.
Chen, Qi, & Guang-chun Ge
2007 “A corpus-based lexical study on frequency and distribution of Coxhead’s AWL word families in medical research articles (RAs).” English for Specific Purposes 26 (4): 502–514.
Cobb, Tom
2003 “Analyzing late interlanguage with learner corpora: Quebec replications of three European studies.” Canadian Modern Language Review 59 (3): 393–424.
Conklin, Kathy, & Norbert Schmitt
2012 “The processing of formulaic language.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 321: 45–61.
Conrad, Susan M.
1996 “Investigating academic texts with corpus-based techniques: An example from biology.” Linguistics and education 8 (3): 299–326.
Cook, Guy
2003Applied linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Coxhead, Averil, & David Hirsch
2007 “A pilot science-specific word list.” Revue française de linguistique appliquée 12 (2): 65–78.
Coxhead, Averil, & Murielle Demecheleer
2018 “Investigating the technical vocabulary of plumbing.” English for Specific Purposes 511: 84–97.
Coxhead, Averil, Liesje Stevens, & Jenna Tinkle
2010 “Why might secondary science textbooks be difficult to read?.” New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics 16 (2): 37.
Coxhead, Averil
2000 “A new academic word list.” TESOL quarterly 34 (2): 213–238.
2011 “The academic word list 10 years on: Research and teaching implications.” TESOL Quarterly 45 (2): 355–362.
Coxhead, Averil
2018Vocabulary and English for specific purposes research: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Cribb, V. Michael, & Xuemei Wang
2019 “Making academic vocabulary count through strategic deployment in oral presentations by Chinese students of English.” The Language Learning Journal: 1–14.
Csomay, Eniko, & Alexandra Prades
2018 “Academic vocabulary in ESL student papers: A corpus-based study.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 331: 100–118.
Drouin, Patrick, Marie-Claude L’Homme, and Benoît Robichaud
2018 “Lexical profiling of environmental corpora.” Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018): 3419–3425.
Durrant, Philip
2016 “To what extent is the Academic Vocabulary List relevant to university student writing?” English for Specific Purposes 431: 49–61.
Farrell, Paul
1990 “Vocabulary in ESP: A Lexical Analysis of the English of Electronics and a Study of Semi-Technical Vocabulary”. CLCS Occasional Paper No. 25. Trinity College.
Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana
2018 “Investigating the collocations available to EAP writers.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 351: 93–104.
1981 “A taxonomic approach to the lexis of science.” In English for Academic and Technical Purposes: Studies in honor of Louis Trimble, ed. by Larry Selinker, Elaine Tarone and Victor Hanzeli, 23–39. Rowley: Newbury House Publishers.
Green, Clarence, & James Lambert
2018 “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 351: 105–115.
Hu, Marcella & Paul Nation
2000 “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension.” Reading in a foreign language 13 (1): 403–430.
Hyland, Ken, & Polly Tse
2007 “Is there an “academic vocabulary”?” TESOL quarterly 41 (2): 235–253.
Hyland, Ken
2001 “Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles.” English for specific purposes 20 (3): 207–226.
Johnson, Keith, & Helen Johnson
1999Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics: A Handbook for Language Teaching. UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Konstantakis, Nikolaos
2007 “Creating a business word list for teaching business English.” ELIA 71: 79–102.
Laufer, Batia
2011 “The contribution of dictionary use to the production and retention of collocations in a second language.” International Journal of Lexicography 24 (1): 29–49.
Lei, Lei, & Dilin Liu
2016 “A new medical academic word list: A corpus-based study with enhanced methodology.” Journal of English for academic purposes 221: 42–53.
Li, Siu Leoung, & Richard Pemberton
1994 “An investigation of students’ knowledge of academic and subtechnical vocabulary.” Proceedings of the joint seminar on corpus linguistics and lexicology. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: 183–196.
Li, Yongyan, & David D. Qian
2010 “Profiling the Academic Word List (AWL) in a financial corpus.” System 38 (3): 402–411.
Liu, Jia, & Lina Han
2015 “A corpus-based environmental academic word list building and its validity test.” English for Specific Purposes 391: 1–11.
Malmström, Hans, Diane Pecorari, & Philip Shaw
2018 “Words for what? Contrasting university students’ receptive and productive academic vocabulary needs.” English for Specific Purposes 501: 28–39.
Martínez, Iliana A., Silvia C. Beck, & Carolina B. Panza
2009 “Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles: A corpus-based study.” English for specific purposes 28 (3): 183–198.
Meyer, Charles F.
2004English corpus linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
Milton, James
2009Measuring second language vocabulary acquisition. England: Multilingual Matters.
Mudraya, Olga
2006 “Engineering English: A lexical frequency instructional model.” English for Specific Purposes 25 (2): 235–256.
Nation, Ian S. P.
2001Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2011Researching and analyzing vocabulary. Boston, MA: Heinle, Cengage Learning.
Nation, Ian S.P.
2015Which words do you need? In The Oxford Handbook of the Word, ed. by John R. Taylor, 568-581. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oakes, Michael P.
1998Statistics for corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.
Paquot, Magali
2005 “Towards a productively-oriented academic word list.” In Practical Applications in Language and Computers, ed. by Jacek Walinski, Krzysztof Kredens, and Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski, 127–140. Frankfurt and Main: Peter Lang.
Qian, David D.
2002 “Investigating the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and academic reading performance: An assessment perspective.” Language learning 52 (3): 513–536.
Richards, Jack C., & Richard W. Schmidt
2013Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. Harlow: Pearson.
Schmitt, Norbert, & Cheryl Boyd Zimmerman
2002 “Derivative word forms: What do learners know?” TESOL Quarterly 36 (2): 145–171.
Schuth, Elisabeth, Judith Köhne, & Sabine Weinert
2017 “The influence of academic vocabulary knowledge on school performance.” Learning and Instruction 491: 157–165.
2004Corpus and text: Basic principles. In Developing linguistic corpora: A guide to good practice, ed. by Martin Wynne, 1–16. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Sinclair, John
1991Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford University Press.
Sridhar, Shikaripur N.
1993 “What are applied linguistics?” International journal of applied linguistics 3 (1): 3–16.
Terryn, Ayla Rigouts, Véronique Hoste, & Els Lefever
2019 “In no uncertain terms: a dataset for monolingual and multilingual automatic term extraction from comparable corpora.” Language Resources and Evaluation: 1–34.
Todd, Richard Watson
2017 “An opaque engineering word list: Which words should a teacher focus on?” English for Specific Purposes 451: 31–39.
2012 “Evidence for the importance of academic word knowledge for the academic achievement of diverse middle school students.” The Elementary School Journal 112 (3): 497–518.
Valipouri, Leila, & Hossein Nassaji
2013 “A corpus-based study of academic vocabulary in chemistry research articles.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12 (4): 248–263.
Vo, Sonca
2019 “Use of lexical features in non-native academic writing.” Journal of Second Language Writing 441: 1–12.
2009 “Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research papers.” English for Specific Purposes 28 (1): 33–41.
Wang, Jing, Shao-lan Liang, & Guang-chun Ge
2008 “Establishment of a medical academic word list.” English for Specific Purposes 27 (4): 442–458.
Ward, Jeremy
2009 “A basic engineering English word list for less proficient foundation engineering undergraduates.” English for specific purposes 28 (3): 170–182.
Webb, Stuart, & Paul Nation
2017How vocabulary is learned. Oxford University Press.
West, Michael
1953A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green & Co.
Yang, Ming-Nuan
2015 “A nursing academic word list.” English for specific purposes 371: 27–38.
Zimmerman, Cheryl
2014 “Teaching and learning vocabulary for second language learners.” In Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, ed. by Celce-Murcia, Marianne, Donna Brinton, and Marguerite Ann Snow. 288–302. Boston, MA: Heinle Cengage Learning.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Chen, Liang‐Ching & Kuei‐Hu Chang
2021. A novel corpus‐based computing method for handling critical word‐ranking issues: An example of COVID‐19 research articles. International Journal of Intelligent Systems 36:7 ► pp. 3190 ff.
Du, Jiali, Christina Alexantris & Pingfang Yu
2021. Towards Chinese Terminology Application of TERMONLINE. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Software and Systems Engineering [Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 271], ► pp. 190 ff.
Gholaminejad, Razieh
2020. A Critical Review of the Word Classification System. HOW 27:2 ► pp. 156 ff.
Ubaque-Casallas, Diego
2020. Non-normative corporalities and transgender identity in English as a Foreign Language student teachers. HOW 27:2 ► pp. 13 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 february 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.