Collins Business Skills Breaking down the AWL selecting and grading academic vocabulary By Julie Moore
Mar 27, 2015
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