Mohammad Alipour Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz Branch

-Significance of academic vocabulary -Three types of vocabulary -General Service List (GSL) -Academic vocabulary -Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) -Shortcomings of AWL -The suggestion? -Corpus selection considerations

-An indispensable component of academic reading abilities. -Linked to academic success, economic opportunities, and societal well-being. -This is true for both native and non-native speakers at all levels of education. -The single most important discriminator in the gate-keeping tests such as IELTS and TOEFL. -An increasing number of L2 students across the world reading academic texts in English.

Nation (2001): 1. High frequency: such as West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) of the most useful word families covering about 80% of most texts. 2. Academic vocabulary: frequent in academic writing comprising some 8% to 10% of running words in academic texts. 3. Technical vocabulary: differing by subject area and covering up to 5% of texts.

-Developed by West (1957) from a corpus of 5 million words. -For the needs of EF/SL learners. -Containing the most useful 2000 word families in English. -Selected based on frequency, ease of learning, and coverage. -Covering 90% of fiction texts, 75% of nonfiction texts, and 76% of the academic corpus.

-It has a long history in teaching ES/AP courses. -Variably referred to as sub-technical vocabulary, semi-technical vocabulary, specialized nontechnical lexis. -Items are reasonably frequent in a range of academic genres. -They are relatively uncommon in other kinds of texts. -Key element of an academic style of writing.

-Particularly challenging for students as they are not familiar with these words like technical ones. -Many of these words occur infrequently to allow incidental learning.

-The need to identify the most frequent and useful academic words. -Developing an Academic Word List (AWL). -AWL can be used by learners, teachers, course designers, and materials developers. -AWL must be taught directly. -An ideal word list must be based on frequency of word families in a corpus of texts occurring in a variety of academic genres and registers

-Developed by Averil Coxhead (2000) using the Range software. -The assumption is that EAP students should study a core of high frequency academic words because they are common in academic registers and texts. -A corpus of 3.5 million words from written texts in Arts, Commerce, Law, and Science. -The list contains 570 word families. These are divided into 10 sub-lists ordered from the most to the least frequent words.

-It does not include words in the GSL. -However, a significant percentage of the vocabulary contained within the AWL is of general use. -Words such as area, approach, create, similar, and occur.

1. Range: The word families also had to occur in at least 15 of the 28 subject areas of the Academic Corpus. This principle ensures that the words in the AWL are useful for all learners. 2. Frequency: They had to occur over 100 times in the corpus. This ensures that the words will be met a reasonable number of times in academic texts. 3. Proper nouns and Latin forms were excluded.

 analysis  approach  area  assessment  assume  authority  available  benefit

 adjacent  albeit  assembly  collapse  colleagues  compiled  conceived  convinced

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-Coxhead found that AWL covered 10% of the words in her corpus. -Only 1.4% of a similar-sized corpus of fiction. So, items are more useful for EAP learners. -Together, GSL and AWL accounted for 86% of the academic corpus. -It helps distinguish EAP from general English and suits a focused language learning agenda.

-Teaching vocabulary should not be decontextualized but based on concordance lines. -AWL can be used to set EAP goals, construct materials, and focus on useful words.

1.Sanctions, such as withholding economicaid, may be applied to any faction. 2.Nothing can be achieved without economicgrowth. 3Women usually did not have economicindependence, nor freedom to … 4.… to determine if they are escaping economicor political hardship. 5.…aware of the shortcomings in the Bush economicpolicy as a whole. 6.… add to the growing political and economicpressures Cuba is facing. 7.He said economicrecovery had also been crippled 8.He said he still hopes economicsanctions can work.

1.Everyone enjoys a simple, economicaland friendly way to travel. 2.… a great little car, reliable and economical, but it had one drawback. 3We offer the most economicalcar parking rates for Glasgow. 4.There is a terrific range of very economicaloccasional furniture at MFI. 5.This laptop is very economicalto use; the batteries last up to 3 hours … 6.To make the most effective and economicaluse of your cooker, it is wise to … 7.They are considerably more economical, especially in stop-start situations. 8.It’s efficient, although it's not as economical, as a gas condensing boiler.

-Hyland and Tse (2007) levelled criticism at Coxhead’s AWL. -The idea of a core academic vocabulary is contentious as it means considerable learning effort with little return. -This idea also fails to engage with current findings of EAP research. -It ignores significant differences in collocational and semantic behavior of words. -Therefore, it does not respond with the ways language is actually used in academic writing and for different disciplines.

-Their findings revealed a more complex picture of language use in disciplines than a general academic vocabulary. -The word families were not distributed evenly across the disciplines. Both frequencies and ranges were different. -Different disciplines show clear preferences for particular meanings and collocations.

-E.g. the word process is far more likely to be used as a noun by engineering and science students than social scientists. This is because of nominalization or grammatical metaphor. Eg: A constant volume combustion process. -Similarly, analyze tends to occur more as a noun in social science, while in engineering, students are six times more likely to encounter it as analytical. Eg: The proteins were analyzed by autoradiography.

-Each discipline represents a way of making sense of human experience that has evolved over generations, and each is dependent on its own rhetorical practices. -Since all fields draw on a specialized lexis, we need to represent a precise disciplinary lexical arsenal. -General AWLs have little usefulness, so we cannot depend on them. -The suggested solution is that students’ target needs must be identified and then they can be addressed by developing discipline-specific AWLs (e.g. chemistry, engineering, applied linguistics, etc.).

1. Size 2. Manageability 3. Representativeness 4. Generalizability 5. Content or composition 6. Data Saturation