Edclicking Keyword Cloud
By Dr. Harry Tennant
Thursday, December 2, 2010 Pass It On Education Content: The Academic Word List This is a really neat two page document educators in many disciplines are likely to find interesting. Many will also find it useful. If you can't use it, I bet you know a colleague who would really appreciate you Passing It On! The following description is from the top of the document: There is a very important specialized vocabulary for learners intending to pursue academic studies in English at the secondary and post-secondary levels. The Academic Word List, compiled by Coxhead (2000), consists of 570 word families that are not in the most frequent 2,000 words of English but which occur reasonably frequently over a very wide range of academic texts. These 570 words are grouped into ten sublists that reflect word frequency and range. A word like analyze falls into Sublist 1, which contains the most frequent words, while the word adjacent falls into Sublist 10 which includes the least frequent (amongst this list of high incidence and high utility words). The following ten sublists contain the headwords of the families in the Academic Word List. In other words, the ten sublists contain the most frequent form of the word, more often a noun or verb form, although there may be one or more important related word forms. For example, the headword analyze would also include analyst, analytic, analytical and analytically in the word family.
The Academic
Word List is not restricted to a specific field of study. That means that the words are useful
for learners studying in disciplines as varied as literature, science, health,
business, and law. This high
utility academic word list does not contain technical words likely to appear in
only one, specialized field of study such as amortization, petroglyph,
onomatopoeia, or cartilage. Two-thirds
of all academic English words come from Latin, French (through Latin), or
Greek. Understandably, knowledge
of the most high incidence and high utility academic words in English can
significantly boost a student’s comprehension level of school-based reading
material. Secondary students who
are taught these high-utility academic words and routinely placed in contexts
requiring their usage are likely to be able to master academic material with
more confidence and efficiency, wasting less time and energy in guessing words
or consulting dictionaries than those who are only equipped with the most basic
2000-3000 words that characterize ordinary conversation. (The word lists follow the description above) Source: Coxhead, Averil. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterrly, 34, 213-238. Averil Coxhead's website.
Check It Out! Pass It On! Posted at 7:26 PM Keywords: Pass It On Education Content , Pass It On , Academic Word List 0 Comments |