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The AWL is a list of words which appear with high frequency in English-language academic texts. The list was compiled by Averil Coxhead at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
The list contains 570 word families and is divided into 10 sublists. Sublist 1 consists of the 60 most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most frequently used words and so on. Each sublist contains 60 word families, except for sublist 10, which contains 30.
To find these words, an analysis was done of academic journals, textbooks, course workbooks, lab manuals, and course notes.
The list was compiled following an analysis of over 3,500,000 words of text.
The words selected for the AWL are words which occur frequently in a range of academic subjects, including the Arts (including history, psychology, sociology, etc.), Commerce (including economics, marketing, management, etc.), Law and the Sciences (including biology, computer science, mathematics, etc.). This means that the AWL is useful to all second-language learners who wish to study in an English-speaking institution no matter what their field of study. The AWL does not, however, include technical words which are specific to a given field. Nor does it contain words which are of general use and very high frequency.
Why should I learn it?
You will need to know this vocabulary if you want to study in an English-speaking college or university. In fact, because these words are so common, they are even useful to those who do not plan to go on to post-secondary study in English. These are words that you will frequently see in newspapers, magazines, and novels, and hear on television, movies or in conversation.
If you know the General Service List, or GSL, which is considered to contain the 2,000 most important words in basic English, and then learn the AWL, your understanding of the vocabulary found in academic texts will increase by 10%. This is important, because research shows that “If, instead of learning the Academic Word List, the learner had moved on to the third 1,000 most frequent words, instead of an additional 10% coverage there would only have been 4.3% extra coverage.”
Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
The Exercises
This site contains 171 gap-fill exercises to review and recycle the general word families contained within the AWL. These exercises can be found on each Sublist page. Gap-fill exercises are an excellent way to recycle vocabulary through different contexts and can be used to broaden the student's understanding of the range of meaning of vocabulary. The online format of the exercises allows students to get immediate feedback on their answers. Students can work through three different exercises for each word family in the AWL. Many of these exercises include different derivations (parts of speech) for the given word. Students are encouraged to complete the exercises for a given level before proceeding to the next level.
Note to Students - Study English at the University of Victoria - in person or online!
Do you want to improve your English? Come study English in beautiful Victoria on the west coast of Canada. A leader in ESL innovation and instruction, the University of Victoria is well known for its outstanding ESL resources, including:
- The Study Zone - English-language lessons and practice exercises created by teachers at our English Language Centre - among the best known and most respected ESL sites on the web;
- Jason's World / Judy's World Soap Opera series - a specially developed audio soap opera series. Jason's World (for intermediate ESL students) and Judy's World (for intermediate/low-advanced ESL students) were created to provide students with the opportunity to practice their listening skills, increase their vocabulary, and discuss important and controversial social issues;
- Englishworld online courses - Writing, Listening, and IT English courses offering international
students an exciting way to study English online, independently or with a personal tutor;
- CD Rom Business English - a dynamic CD-ROM designed to help non-native English speakers learn about the language and culture of North American business meetings;
- Idioms - an interactive CD-ROM which introduces 192 frequently used North American idioms, explaining cultural context and allowing users to practice the idioms in realistic settings, improving oral fluency;
- and this site, Vocabulary Exercises for the Academic Word List.
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In addition to these excellent online resources, the University of Victoria offers outstanding language immersion opportunities for students from all over the world. Recognized internationally, our programs combine the best in classroom instruction, English as a Second Language (ESL) technology, and exciting cultural activities. For more information, visit our website.
Note to Teachers
All the vocabulary exercises on this website were created using Gerry's Vocabulary Teacher. Each exercise took about 2 minutes to make. Go to our website to download the demo. Purchasing the software program will allow you to quickly and easily review the AWL vocabulary in greater depth, including looking at the various derivations. It will also allow you to reinforce, review and test other non-AWL vocabulary which you have introduced in your English class. Again, students will benefit through review of target vocabulary in sentences in context, using gap-fill exercises such as those found on this website. In a matter of minutes you can create these exercises for use on your own website or as hard copy (paper documents) for classroom study and homework assignments.
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Vocabulary review software |
50,000 sentences in context |
Create gap-fill exercises |
Produce online exercises |
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