Collins Business Skills Breaking down the AWL selecting and grading academic vocabulary By Julie...

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