Academic word lists: A comprehensive review

Abstract

The significance of vocabulary in academic success is well-established, particularly for second language learners navigating English Medium Instruction or academic contexts. This paper explores the development and evaluation of major academic word lists to support second language learners. To contextualize the academic vocabulary, it first provides a brief overview of the general high-frequency and discipline-specific vocabulary, followed by a historical background of word lists developed in the 1970s, which influenced the creation of the vocabulary lists in use today. It then reviews the major academic vocabulary lists currently in use. Starting with the influential University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984) developed in the 80s, the paper evaluates the comparative significance and relevance of the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), the New Academic Word List (Browne, et al., 2013), and the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014). These lists are evaluated based on their (a) representation – frequency, range, and dispersion of words included in the list, (b) currency – how up-to-date the corpus is from which a word list is extracted, (c) corpus size, and (d) strengths and weakness of each word list from teaching perspective. The analysis identifies the Academic Vocabulary List as particularly useful for second language learners engaged in academic reading and writing, due to its broad disciplinary coverage, lemma-based design, and empirical validation using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).