Probably the biggest challenge for international students preparing for university education in English is the enormous amount of vocabulary that is necessary to learn. This challenge can be divided into two distinct problems:
- What vocabulary to prioritise in students’ learning?
- How to use the vocabulary correctly in speaking and writing?
To answer the first question, it is helpful to think about vocabulary in terms of frequency of occurrence. If we know how frequently words occur in English, we can prioritise learning those that occur most frequently, thus raising the practical efficiency of our learning. the good news is that linguistic researchers have produced several lists that can help students prioritise their vocabulary learning.
The main vocabulary lists based on frequency of occurrence that we recommend for our students are:
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The New General Service List (NGSL)
This is a list of some 2800 high frequency words created in 2013 by Browne, Culligan and Phillips, which covers around 92% of a typical English language text. It is therefore strongly advised that students pay very careful attention to learning the words on this list. Simply click the link above, open the Excel spreadsheet and make sure you know the words in the first column. If you want to test yourself on your knowledge of the NGSL, click here for quizzes and flash cards 🙂
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The Academic Word List (AWL)
Created by Avril Coxhead in 2000, this is a list of 570 word families that occur frequently in academic writing across different academic disciplines. In addition to the basic list provided in the link above, it is also useful for students to know the different forms of the words on the AWL and which of these forms occur most frequently (see this pdf). This list is particularly helpful because it is widely used in academic English lessons and there are various learning resources available: Gerry’s AWL Exercises (site might take some time to load but it does work in China), EAP vocabulary: Exercises, Academic English Exercises or make your own gapfill tests using EAP Foundation’s gapfill maker.
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NAWL & AVL
The New Academic Word List (NAWL) was created by the makers of the New General Service List as an updated version of the AWL (exercises for the NAWL). The Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) was created by Gardner & Davies (2013) but is not readily available. Both look very useful but do not appear to be widely used in academic English courses. I nevertheless include links for students who want to access more vocabulary lists based on frequency of occurrence.
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High School Word Lists
The Secondary School Vocabulary Lists are a collection of 24 word lists of words commonly used in high school organised by discipline/subject.
That solves the problem of which words to prioritise, so how about the second problem – how to use the words?
My recommendation is to use the British Academic Written English corpus on SketchEngine and create concordance lines like the ones shown below. This will help you to see how a word is used in academic writing. You can use my tutorial to learn how to use this SketchEngine tool (find the section ‘Demonstration’ and start there).
