Is There an “Academic Vocabulary”?

TLDR

This article considers the notion of academic vocabulary, the assumption that EAP students should study a core of high‑frequency words common in an English academic register. The study examines the value of the academic vocabulary term by analyzing the distribution of Coxhead’s Academic Word List in a 3.3‑million‑word corpus and argues that disciplinary differences undermine its usefulness, recommending that teachers foster discipline‑specific lexical repertoires. The authors analyze the distribution of 570 word families from Coxhead’s Academic Word List across a 3.3‑million‑word corpus spanning multiple academic disciplines and genres. The AWL covers 10.6 % of the corpus, but individual lexical items vary across disciplines in range, frequency, collocation, and meaning, indicating that the list may not be as general as intended and challenging the assumption that a single core vocabulary suffices for academic study.

Abstract

This article considers the notion of academic vocabulary : the assumption that students of English for academic purposes (EAP) should study a core of high frequency words because they are common in an English academic register. We examine the value of the term by using Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) to explore the distribution of its 570 word families in a corpus of 3.3 million words from a range of academic disciplines and genres. The findings suggest that although the AWL covers 10.6% of the corpus, individual lexical items on the list often occur and behave in different ways across disciplines in terms of range, frequency, collocation, and meaning. This result suggests that the AWL might not be as general as it was intended to be and, more importantly, questions the widely held assumption that students need a single core vocabulary for academic study. We argue that the different practices and discourses of disciplinary communities undermine the usefulness of such lists and recommend that teachers help students develop a more restricted, discipline‐based lexical repertoire.