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THE IMPORTANCE OF ACADEMIC VOCABULARY LIST
Rahmatova Nozima Baxtiyor qizi
Buxoro davlat Pedagogika instituti stajor-o’qituvchisi
+998 88 135 16 66
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13896717
Annotation.
This thesis gives information about Academic Vocabulary List and the use of
it in academic contexts. It is also stated the distiction of Academic Word List from Academic
Vocabulary List. The thesis highlights exact numbers in its composition.
Key words.
Academic Vocabulary List, Academic Word List and Academic Keyword list.
These are suggested different researchers with different functions.
According to definition provided by Coxhead (2000), the Academic Word List is derived
from a corpus that aims to capture the general academic vocabulary of English. It has had a
significant historical impact on pedagogy and research. Coxhead (2000) devided over 3.500
million written words into 28 categories based on four fields: science, commerce, the arts, and
law. 570 word families were arranged. Words are usually utilized in an academic context. Nagy
and Townsend (2012) claimed that AWL can be utilized by students who learn or work
independently in college or university courses.
It is necessary here to clarify exactly what is meant by Academic Vocabulary List and state
the differences from other vocabulary lists. A 120 million-word in academic sub-corpus of the
Corpus of Contemporary American serves as the foundation for the Academic Vocabulary List
(Gardner & Davies, 2014). The nine subjects are covered by the sub-corpus that come from
newspapers' finance sections, academic magazines, and academic journals.
In many significant ways, this list differs from Coxhead's (2000) influential Academic
Word List (AWL). It is based on a larger, more diverse corpus. This is a significant advancement
because the AWL has been widely criticized for its skew toward particular subject areas and
the small size of corpus it was based on (Durrant, 2014).
The AVL is constructed using lemmas rather than word families, which consist of
headwords and their inflectionally and derivationally related forms. Nation (2001) notes that
understanding a headword is likely to facilitate comprehension of derivationally related forms
and this justifies the decision to make the AWL a list of word families. According to Durrant et.
al. (2009), this is a dubious assumption because word families frequently combine forms with
very different meanings (for instance, the AWL item constitute encompasses constituting,
constituent, and unconstitutional). However, Schmitt & Zimmerman (2002) argues that it is
often difficult for students to able to make connections between even relatively related forms,
and Gardner (2008), Hyland and Tse (2007) add to this point that the conflation of such items
has been seen as a significant weakness of the list. Therefore, the AVL shows lemmas rather
than word families (headwords plus inflectionally-related forms only).
The next term Academic Keyword List (AKL) is created by Magali Paquot, which contains
233 verbs, 180 adjectives, 87 adverbs, and 75 other words. AKL is completely different from
AWL because it includes common words that have been shown to be important for structuring
academic prose (Wessels, 2011). The AKL is reasonable for educators and researchers who use
it for instructing content, research papers or purposes (Nushi, & Jenabzadeh, 2016).
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References:
1.
Coxhead, A. (2000). The new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
2.
Durrant, P. (2013). Discipline and level specificity in university students' written
vocabulary. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 328–356. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt016
3.
Gardner, D. (2008). Validating the construct of word in applied corpus-based vocabulary
research:
a
critical
survey.
Applied
Linguistics,
28
(2),
241-265,
http://applij.oxfordjournals.org.library3.webster.edu/content/28/2/241.full
4.
Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35
(3), 305-327.
5.
http://applij.oxfordjournals.org.library3.webster.edu/content/35/3/305.full
6.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2007). Is there an ‘Academic vocabulary’? TESOL Quarterly, 41 (2),
77-78 http://www.jstor.org.library3.webster.edu/stable/40264352
7.
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as
language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(1), 91–108.
8.
Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.
9.
Nushi, M., & Jenabzadeh, H. (2016). Teaching andLearning Academic Vocabulary.
10.
California Linguistic Notes, 40(2), 51-70.
11.
Schmitt, N., & Zimmerman, C. B. (2002). Derivative word forms: What do learners know?
TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 145. https://doi.org/10.2307/3588328
12.
Wessels, S. (2011). Promoting vocabulary learning for English learners. The Reading
Teacher, 65(1), 46–50. https://doi.org/10.1598/rt.65.1.6.
