The  Academic  Word  List  Reorganized  for  SSELLs     46th  Annual  TESOL  Convention  Robert  Bushong,  rwbushong@yahoo.com     Philadelphia,  PA  Keith  Folse,  Keith.Folse@ucf.edu     March  29,  2012  

The Academic Word List Reorganized for Spanish-Speaking ELLs 46th  Annual  TESOL  Convention  and  Exhibit,  Philadelphia,  PA  

Robert Bushong Keith Folse ESL Instructor, UCF Professor, MATESOL Program UCF The Academic Word List The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570 headwords developed by Averil Coxhead (2000) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The purpose of the AWL is to provide ESL/EFL students and instructors with a list of words common in tertiary education. The AWL is widely used largely because of how it was constructed. A major difference between previous lists, such as the General Service List (West, 1953) University Word List (Guo-yi & Nation, 1984), and the AWL is the use of (then) new software to monitor word frequency. Using data-collecting software, Coxhead scanned more than 3.5 million words in 414 texts across twenty-eight subjects. The subsequent 570 words have been divided into ten sublists, the first sublist consisting of the most frequent words and the tenth sublist consisting of the least frequent words. Examples from Sublist 1 sector • available • financial • process • individual • specific • principle • estimate • variables • method • data • research • contract • environment • export • source   Principles of Selection Used in Developing the AWL The word families of the Academic Word List were selected according to several principles in this order of importance: (1) Range. The AWL families had to occur in the Arts, Commerce, Law and Science faculty sections of the Academic Corpus. The word families also had to occur in over half of the 28 subject areas of the Academic Corpus. (Just over 94% of the words in the AWL occur in 20 or more subject areas.) (2) Frequency. The AWL families had to occur over 100 times in the 3,500,000 word Academic Corpus in order to be considered for inclusion in the list. (3) Uniformity of frequency. The AWL families had to occur a minimum of 10 times in each faculty of the Academic Corpus to be considered for inclusion in the list. Words Excluded From the Academic Word List (1) Words in the first 2,285 words of English (West's General Service List, 1953). (2) Narrow range words. Words in fewer than 4 faculty sections of the Academic Corpus or in fewer than 15 of the 28 subject areas of the A.C. (Technical or specialist words) (3) Proper nouns. (4) Latin forms. (et al., etc., i.e., and ibid)  Directly quoted from http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/information/principles  

The  Academic  Word  List  Reorganized  for  SSELLs     46th  Annual  TESOL  Convention  Robert  Bushong,  rwbushong@yahoo.com     Philadelphia,  PA  Keith  Folse,  Keith.Folse@ucf.edu     March  29,  2012  

The Academic Word List Reorganized for SSELLs: The Study Research Question To what extent do the 570 headwords in the Academic Word List consist of English-Spanish true cognates, partial cognates, false cognates, and non-cognates? Types of Cognates (1) True cognates share core meanings, as well as similar orthography and phonology. (2) Partial cognates share one core meaning but not another, and they share similar orthography and phonology. (3) False cognates differ in core meanings but share similar orthography and phonology. Procedure (1) Collected data from bilingual, monolingual, and cognate dictionaries (2) Compared data compiled from the dictionaries (3) Consulted additional resources when the dictionary data were insufficient (4) Operationalized cognate as three types of cognates (5) Compared cognates and homographs by using the data collected in this study and an AWL homograph list (Ming-Tzu & Nation, 2004) (4) Labeled each AWL word as a true, partial, false, or non-cognate (5) Compiled cognate lists by (a) alphabetical order and (b) cognate type Findings Of the 570 words in the AWL, 434 (76%) are true cognates, 14 (2%) are partial cognates, 16 (3%) are false cognates, and 106 (19%) are non-cognates. Implications for Teaching With knowledge of English-Spanish cognates on the AWL, teachers, curriculum designers, and textbook writers can make better choices about (1) which AWL words need to be explicitly taught to Spanish-speaking ELLs and (2) the amount of time necessary to be spent on each AWL word with Spanish-speaking ELLs. Future Research (1) To what extent can Spanish-speaking ELLs correctly identify the English-Spanish cognates on the AWL? (2) To what extent do the 570 headwords on the AWL consist of cognates from other Romance language, such as Portuguese, French, and Italian? (3) Is there a higher number of cognates in the AWL sublists of more frequent terms? For example, do we find more English-Spanish cognates in Sublist 1 than Sublist 10? Selected Bibliography Coxhead, A. (n.d.) AWL selection. Victoria University of Wellington. Retrieved March

28, 2012, from http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238.

Ming-Tzu, K.W., & Nation, P. (2004). Word meaning in academic English: Homography in the Academic Word List. Applied Linguistics, 25, 291–314.