ES5000 Chap.2 Academic Vocabulary and the Academic Word List
Academic Vocabulary and the Academic Word List
What the Academic Word List is for
Your discipline gives you its own terminology. What it does not give you is the general academic vocabulary that surrounds those terms: the verbs and nouns used to analyse, compare, estimate, define and interpret across every field.
The Week 2 features handout calls this layer sub-technical vocabulary, and the Academic Word List is a ranked collection of it, organised so that you can learn the most useful words first.
How the list is organised
The words are grouped into families under a headword, and the list document marks in italics the member that occurs most often in the academic corpus behind it.
Families are arranged in ten sub lists by frequency: Sub List 1 holds the most common families and Sub List 10 the least common. The document states that each sub list contains sixty families except the tenth, which contains thirty.
A separate headword list gives every headword with its sub list number, which makes it easy to check how common a word you already use really is.
Why families matter more than single words
Knowing a headword is not the same as knowing its family.
The grammar quizzes and the writing assignments both reward choosing the right member for the slot in the sentence, whether that is the noun, the verb, the adjective or the adverb. Spelling variants belong to the same family too, so British and American forms are not different words.
Learning a family as a set is what turns the list into accurate sentences.
How the course paces it
The Week 2 wrap-up asks you to commit to one sub list a week and to try one activity a week. The preparation pages from Week 3 onwards name the sub list activity for that week, and each wrap-up page points to the answers.
The activities vary: choosing meanings, completing sentences with the right family member, finding one word that fits two sentences, filling gaps and finding the words in a grid, and matching words to definitions.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Sub-technical vocabulary as the layer the list covers
- 02
Word families, headwords and the most frequent member
- 03
Ten sub lists ranked by frequency, and their sizes
- 04
Spelling variants inside one family
- 05
One sub list a week, as the weekly pages assign it
- 06
The activity formats and what each one tests
Worked example · free
Choosing the family member for each slot
- 2Identify the slot each gap sits in.
- 2Choose the form each slot requires.
- 2Check number and tense against the rest of the sentence.
Key terms
- Academic Word List
- A ranked list of word families common across academic writing, arranged in ten sub lists by frequency.
- Word Family
- A headword together with its related forms, such as analyse, analysis, analyst and analytical.
- Headword
- The base word under which a family is listed and by which it is looked up.
- Sub List
- One of the ten frequency bands of the list, with Sub List 1 holding the most common families.
- Collocation
- A word that habitually accompanies another, such as conduct with research, worth learning alongside the family.
Academic Vocabulary and the Academic Word List FAQ
How many words are in the Academic Word List?
The course's list document gives sixty families in each of the first nine sub lists and thirty in the tenth, which comes to 570 families. Each family contains several forms, so the number of individual words is considerably larger than that figure.
Which sub lists should I learn first?
Start with Sub List 1 and move down, because the lists are ranked by frequency and the first ones repay study fastest. The weekly pages follow exactly that order, naming one sub list activity a week from Week 3 onwards.
Do I need both British and American spellings?
The list places both spellings in the same family, so they are the same word. What matters is consistency: choose one convention for a piece of writing and keep to it, which the proofreading handout also stresses.
Is the list enough vocabulary for a graduate programme?
No. It covers the general academic layer, not your field's terminology. Use it for the language you need to describe, compare and evaluate, and build your discipline's terms from its own textbooks and papers.
Assessment move
Each week, take ten families from the current sub list and write one sentence about your own research for each, using a different member of the family from the one you know best. Check your sentences against the activity answers the wrap-up page points to.
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