Collins Business Skills

Breaking down the AWLselecting and grading academic vocabulary

By Julie Moore

Collins Business Skills

Choosing academic vocabulary

• Selecting vocabularyAcademic Word List (AWL)Non-AWL vocabulary

• Grading vocabulary by levelSplitting into 3 levels

Collins Business Skills

The Academic Word List (AWL)

• Developed by Averil Coxhead (2000)• Based on corpus of academic texts• Excludes top 2000 common words• Excludes subject-specific words• 570 headwords• Word families > over 5000 individual items

Collins Business Skills

Non-AWL vocabulary

• Top end of the 2000 most common words• Less common senses of the top 2000 e.g. table

• IELTS topic vocabulary (past paper topics)

data commentary task

• Key academic concepts: cause & effect, time & sequence

• Syllabus vocabularye.g. Biology: bacteria, cell, nerve, virus

Collins Business Skills

Grading by level

• Level 1: StarterIELTS 4.0-5.5

• Level 2: ImproverIELTS 5.5-6.5

• Level 3: AdvancedIELTS 7.0+

Collins Business Skills

Grading by frequency

• AWL sublistsFrequency within academic corpus1-10 (1 = most frequent)

• Collins COBUILD frequency bandingFrequency in General English (5) = most frequent[-] (0) = least frequent

Collins Business Skills

Grading: easy cases

Word AWL sublist COBUILD band IELTS book

research 1 (5) 1

available 1 (5) 1

environment 1 (4) 1

analogy 9 - (1) 3

paradigm 7 - (1) 3

intrinsic 10 - (1) 3

Collins Business Skills

Issues & anomalies:

economy noun (5)

economic adjective (5)

economical adjective - (1)

economically adverb - (0)

economics noun (3)

economist noun (3)

uneconomical adjective - (0)

Collins Business Skills

Entry for level 1economy (economies)NOUN The economy of a country or region is the system by which money,industry, and trade are organized. ❍ Zimbabwe boasts Africa’s mostindustrialised economy. ❍ The Japanese economy grew at an annual rate of morethan 10 per cent. ❍ the region’s booming service economy

▶ collocations:the economy of somewherea modern/industrial/service/market economya booming/strong/weak economythe global/world/local/domestic economythe American/Canadian/Japanese/British economystimulate/revive/boost the economythe economy grows/recovers/shrinks/slows down

economic

ADJECTIVE Economic means concerned with the organization of themoney, industry, and trade of a country, region, or society. ❍ Poland’sradical economic reforms ❍ The pace of economic growth is picking up. ❍ thecurrent economic crisis

➔ see note at financial

Entry for level 2

Collins Business Skills

Issues & anomalies• General – academic frequencies

colleague – AWL sublist 10team – AWL sublist 9

• Splitting senses

conduct a. carry out level 2b. electricity level 3

• Semantic sets

advantage (/ 4), disadvantage (- / 2)

Collins Business Skills

The final breakdown

Book Total entries AWL entries* AWL %In each book

Level 1: Starter 789 112 14%Level 2: Improver 800 330 41%Level 3: Advanced 704 180 26%

*Total of 622 AWL entries across all three books: includes all 570 AWL headwords + 52 repeated headwords (e.g. economy appears in 1 &2)

Collins Business Skills

COBUILD Key Words for IELTS

Collins ELT: www.collinselt.com Julie Moore: www.juleswords.co.uk