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This site contains academic vocabulary lists of English that are based on
120 million words of academic texts in the
Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA). As our August 2013
article in Applied Linguistics points out, there are
important differences
between these lists and the
Academic Word List created by Coxhead (2000).
There are three ways to access
the lists (all of which are completely free):
1.
Download the lists (as Excel files)
for offline use (these three links are short one-page samples):
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The Academic Vocabulary List
(AVL) itself (top 3,000 lemmas, which occur in all academic domains)
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The AVL words grouped into word families
(similar to Coxhead's AWL, but with much more information)
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Top 20,000 words (lemmas) in COCA-Academic, including AVL words,
domain-specific words, and "genre-neutral" words
2. Use the online interface to
browse through the list and see detailed information about each word -- its definition, the frequency
in each of the nine academic domains (e.g. Medicine,
Science, or Business), the collocates (nearby words, which
give great insight into word meaning and usage), re-sortable
concordance lines (which show the patterns in which the word occurs), and
synonyms -- all from just COCA Academic.
3. Use the online interface to
input entire academic texts, and see frequency profiles of all words in
the text. You
can click on any word to see all of the information shown in #2
above. You can also click on any phrase to find related phrases in
COCA-Academic.
Mark Davies and
Dee
Gardner
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