Academic English: Spotlight on the New Academic Word List (NAWL)

For the past 10 years, the New General Service List Project has created short, efficient, corpus-based wordlists to meet the specific needs of EFL learners. Each of our 7 open-source lists offers the highest coverage in the world for that specific genre, making these lists excellent starting points for language learning courses, flashcard learning, EFL textbooks, and graded reader development.

For most second language learners the best starting point will be the New General Service List (NGSL) since its 2809 words offers an average of 92% coverage for most written materials of general English and even higher for most general English listening materials. This is a remarkable number as it represents less than 0.5% of the English language and less than 10% of the vocabulary of a college-educated native speaker of English.

But for EFL learners who hope to go on to study at university in an English speaking country this is not enough. Academic English is a very specialized and difficult type of English and the vocabulary of university lectures and textbooks is often dense and filled with specialized words. Understanding and extracting meaning from these materials is crucial for academic success. Knowledge of such vocabulary is also important for students writing research papers, participating in class discussions, or delivering presentations. EFL learners who have a solid grasp of academic vocabulary are better equipped to excel in coursework, assignments, and examinations. They can more effectively engage with course materials, analyze research articles, and construct well-argued essays, enhancing their chances of achieving higher grades.

This is the purpose of our New Academic Word List (Browne, 2013, 2016, 2021). The NAWL 1.2 (https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/new-general-service-list-1) is a 957 word list of the most important words for general academic English and is designed to work in conjunction with our NGSL 1.2. The NAWL is an update and replacement for Averil Coxhead’s excellent Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), also known as the AWL. A replacement of the original AWL was needed since (1) the original AWL was designed to work only with the old GSL (West, 1953), which has a different number of words than the NGSL, (2) the word units in the NGSL Project are modified lexemes (or flemmas) rather than the word family approach used by the AWL and (3) we hoped to attain higher coverage with the NAWL than the AWL was able to achieve.

When the NGSL and NAWL are learned together, they give about 92% coverage for our 288 million word academic corpus which is about 5% higher than the original GSL and AWL. Recent research shows that these coverage figures are quite high out in the real world as well, with the NGSL and NAWL providing 90% coverage for a 5 million word corpus of over 18,000 academic journal abstracts from a wide range of disciplines (Hendry and Sheepy, 2018).

In order to help students to find out which specific NAWL words they should study, a diagnostic test of written receptive knowledge of the NAWL was developed by Phil Bennet and Tim Stoeckel (Bennett & Stoeckel, 2013). Known as the NAWLT (https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/ngslt-nawlt) and modeled after the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007), the 40 question test helps place students in approximately the right frequency band for study of NAWL words via our Quizlet word stacks and our NAWL smartphone apps (NAWL Builder and Word-Learner).

The NAWL word list, NAWLT vocabulary test, Quizlet flashcard stacks and smartphone apps are all open-source, free and available from the New General Service List Project website (https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/)

References

Bennett, P., & Stoeckel, T. (2013). Developing equivalent forms of a test of general and academic vocabulary. In N. Sonda & A. Krause (Eds.), JALT2012 Conference Proceedings. Tokyo: JALT. 

Browne, C. (2021), "The NGSL Project: Building Wordlists and Resources to help EFL Learners (and Teachers) to Succeed".  Invited Chapter in Teaching with Technology 2020, Selected Papers from the JALTCALL 2020 Conference. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.37546/JALTSIG.CALL2020.1

Browne, C. (2016), "The NGSL, NAWL, TSL and BSL: Building a Path to EFL Success through Word Lists and Online Tools".  In Vocab@Tokyo Published Proceedings. Paper presented at Vocab@Tokyo Conference: Tokyo, Japan.

Browne, C. (July, 2013), "The New General Service List: Celebrating 60 years of vocabulary learning”, The Language Teacher, 37:4, 13-15.

Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238.

Hendry, C., & Sheepy, E. (2018). How much vocabulary is needed for comprehension of research publications in education?. Future-proof CALL: language learning as exploration and encounters–short papers from EUROCALL 2018, 94.

Nation, I., & Beglar, D. (2007). A Vocabulary Size Test. The Language Teacher, 31, 9-13.