Degree
Master of Arts
Program
Education
Supervisor
Supervisor: Dr. Farahnaz Faez; joint supervisor: Dr. Stuart Webb
Abstract
This study was a corpus-based comparison between two academic vocabulary lists: Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) and Gardner and Davies’ (2014) Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). Comparisons were made between different types of lexical coverage provided by the AWL and the AVL in the University Academic Corpus (72-million tokens). The findings indicated that the performance of the AWL and the AVL was different when different evaluation criteria were adopted and learners with different lexical sizes were considered. For learners without English vocabulary knowledge, the most frequent 570 word families of the AVL outperformed the AWL, while the AWL could provide more support for learners with lexical sizes of the most frequent 1,000-5,000 word families. The decisive factors for academic wordlist coverage were concluded to be the number and the lexical frequency of academic wordlist items. Implications, limitations, and suggestions are listed for future research.
Recommended Citation
Qi, Huamin, "A Corpus-Based Comparison Between the Academic Word List and the Academic Vocabulary List" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. Paper 3556.
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3556