Talk:Academic Word List

Recent articles suggest that the AWL may not be as 'academic' as the name suggests. In fact, by assuming that the GSL represented the 'common' words in English, the words that appeared frequently in Coxhead's corpus analysis were, by default, 'academic'. In fact, to a great degree, Coxhead actually provided some well-needed updates to the GSL. 'JOB' is just one of many examples.

Further research that I conducted with my colleague Ali Billuroglu lead us to the conclusion that there was no 'academic' word list, but rather what is warranted is an expanded 'general' word list, especially in the context of teaching English as a foreign language. For example, 'study', 'research' and 'report' are words in the GSL, but they are also very high frequency words in any academic corpus. Dividing a list into 'general' and 'academic' words seems inappropriate and only serves to fragment the approach to lexis taken by EFL teachers. See our article at http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnl/BNL_Rationale.doc for a full discussion of this.

More recently, Hyland and Tse (Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (June 2007). Is there an "Academic Vocabulary"? TESOL Quarterly, Volume 41, Number 2, pp. 235-253.) argue that the AWL needs to be treated with a good deal of caution in its application in materials design or EFL teaching. Their justification in criticism about Coxhead's corpus design in particular, and the notion of an 'academic word list' as being unattainable, has a good degree of validity.

Steve.neufeld (talk) 15:11, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Why does Template:Frequency list put Academic Word List under Add-ons?
Note: I've placed this here to get more people involved. To read about or discuss this issue, please go to Template talk:Frequency list, in the section of the same name. Thanks! --Geekdiva (talk) 21:01, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

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NAWL
With the revision of the GSL to the NGSL, there is also a NAWL, for which the English Wikipedia has no entry. At the very least, its existence should be mentioned in this article. Kdammers (talk) 19:06, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Please note that although Coxhead's article's title says "new ...," it is referring to her original AWL; the NAWL was developed in the teens. Kdammers (talk) 19:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)