A question I get asked a lot from teachers and school leaders is ‘what is the word list that best helps pupils grasp the academic language of school?’
The regular – perhaps unsatisfactory – answer I offer is that word lists don’t quite do the job we’d hope. There is no silver-bullet word list that secures academic success. That said, they can offer a useful starting point to hold up to our curriculum plans, consider what we want pupils to use in their talk and writing, and more.
Everyone loves a good list. Whether it is subject specific vocabulary lists, general academic vocabulary lists, or even spelling lists, they can offer handy starting points to reflect on the language we use in the classroom and beyond.
Academic Word Lists
Perhaps the most popular word list is Coxhead’s ‘Academic Word List’ (AWL). It has collated 570-word families (e.g. ‘analysis’ represents the wider family of ‘analyse’, ‘analyses’, ‘analysed’ and analyst) derived from over 3.5 million words from a range of university texts. Coxhead excludes the 2000 most common words in English, and she includes only word families that appear at least 100 times.
If you explore the 60 top words in the AWL (such as analyse, approach, area and assess), it offers a handy proxy for the type of academic language that becomes the norm in reading and writing in secondary school.
There are a range of other word lists – some general and some more subject specific:
