In recent years, word lists have become increasingly important as a tool to approach the teaching of vocabulary. The usefulness of any given list depends on the extent to which it is fit for its purpose. Philip Durrant’s study looks at the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) – different from the Academic World List (AWL) – developed for learners of academic English. This lists the most useful words for the understanding of academic texts. But if we are interested in the needs of such students for the writing of academic texts, Durrant suggests that a revised list will be more appropriate.

The Study

It is generally (but not universally) agreed that it makes sense for learners (and teachers) to target high frequency words in a language in a deliberate way. The reason for this is ‘is the cost / benefit principle which says that learners should get the best return for their learning effort. By learning the high frequency words first, the learners will have the greatest opportunities to enrich their knowledge through later meetings with the words, and will have the greatest opportunity to produce what they know. A graded list of high frequency words can thus be a great asset for a course designer’ (Nation, 2016: 11).

The question, then, is: what are the high frequency words that learners should devote their attention to? The answer will depend on the learner’s reasons for studying. For those who will need English for higher education (e.g. following a university course where English is the medium of instruction), the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) is probably the most well-known and widely-used resource. Derived from a corpus of 3.5 million words of academic text, it excludes the most frequent 2000 words in English (as listed in the General Service List of 1953 (West, 1953)) and lists 570 word families which account for about 10% of the words in academic texts.

More recently, Gardner and Davies (Gardner & Davies, 2014) have developed the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). Durrant argues that this represents ‘a substantial advance on previous academic wordlists, both in terms of the size and representativeness of the corpus on which it is based and in terms of the methodology used’. If this is the case, should the AVL replace the AWL as the first port-of-call for designers of courses of EAP (e.g. IELTS preparation courses)?

Durrant notes two reasons why the AVL (and, for that matter, the AWL) might need to be approached with caution. Firstly, it has been argued that the ‘differences between the vocabulary of different [academic] disciplines are so extensive that no single wordlist is likely adequately to meet the needs of all EAP students’. Secondly, the corpora from which academic wordlists are derived are based entirely on texts which students are likely to read, not on the kind of language they are likely to need to write. He argues that ‘a pedagogical focus on productive vocabulary is as at least as important as one on receptive vocabulary’.

Durrant therefore took as his raw data the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, a collection of assignments written by students at four British universities, compared this to insights from the AVL, focusing on the level of the students and the academic discipline they were studying.

Results

Durrant found that, on the whole, the items in the AVL represented a significant proportion (about 34%) of the lexical items that students used in their academic writing. He also found that the proportion of AVL items in students’ writing increased slightly as students progressed academically (29% for first year undergraduates, and 34% for Masters level students). This suggests that the AVL ‘is a good learning investment for students in general’.

However, there are a number of caveats.

1. There was wide variation (from 2% to 62%) in the proportion of AVL items in different texts, suggesting that the list ‘may be more useful for some writing purposes than for others’.
2. There was also wide variation when different academic disciplines were considered, ranging from 21 – 25% for Classics, English and Medicine to 35 – 40% for Economics, Business and Psychology. Sciences like Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science fell in the middle with a coverage of between 29 – 33%. His analysis suggests that the AVL may be much more appropriate for some students than for others.
3. ‘As in most vocabulary lists, the frequency of AVL items is highly skewed, and the majority of coverage is therefore achieved by a relatively small number of items’ writes Durrant. Putting this into concrete figures, he notes that ‘while the most frequent 32 items on the AVL together cover 5% of lexical words, the least frequent 1,471 items manage only 1% coverage between them’. This suggests that some of the items on the AVL are much more worth paying attention to than others. Durrant suggests that it may make sense to focus on ‘a small core of 427 items […] found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines’, rather than learning the entire list. His list of core items is included in the article.

Practical implications

It is clear from the above that the AVL is a useful guide but needs to be treated with some caution. A learning / teaching focus on Durrant’s 427 items would appear to make more sense than a more ambitious attempt to deal with the entirety of the AVL (or, for that matter, the AWL). However, more research is needed before this can be settled. Would the same results be found with a wider sample of texts from some relatively unrepresented disciplines? How would results be different with a corpus from students in American universities? Or those following EMI courses in any number of countries?

More generally, Durrant’s very valuable research project reminds us of the need to consider all vocabulary lists with a critical eye. At a time when most major publishers of English learning materials are using lists to underpin their vocabulary syllabuses, and claiming some sort of ‘research authority’ for these materials, we would do well to remember that this remains more sciency than science.

References

The Academic Vocabulary List can be freely accessed at http://www.academicvocabulary.info/

The Academic Word List can be freely accessed at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (2), 213 – 238.

Durrant, P. (2016). To what extent is the Academic Vocabulary List relevant to university student writing? English for Specific Purposes Vol. 43, July 2016, pp 49–61.

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 305-327.

Nation, I.S.P. (2016). Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

West, M. (1953). A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green & Co.