What should be considered as general academic vocabulary? An analysis of the Academic Word List, the Academic Keyword List and the Academic Vocabulary List

While research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) discovered quite early on that academic disciplines can differ in the way they use language to construct knowledge, the increase in the number of general EAP courses across the world acted as a catalyst for the search of a teachable common-core (de Chazal 2013). This led, for example, to a growing interest in general academic vocabulary, i.e. the vocabulary that is “neither highly technical and specific to a certain field of knowledge nor obviously general in the sense of being everyday words which are not used in a distinctive way in specialized texts” (Baker 1988: 91). One of the reasons for this is that academic vocabulary is said to be the most difficult type of vocabulary for EAP learners as they are – as opposed to technical vocabulary – “not central to the topics of the texts in which they occur” (Coxhead 2000: 214) and “tend to pass unnoticed” (Granger 2017: 9). Since the advent of corpus linguistics, three different academic vocabulary lists have been proposed: the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), the Academic Keyword list (Paquot 2010) and the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies 2013). The aim of the present paper is to examine these lists and compare the types of vocabulary items they consider worth teaching through an analysis of the academic verbs they contain. Overall, the results reveal that, while all three studies generally define academic vocabulary in the same way, they do not seem to agree on what exactly should be included in such vocabulary lists. As a result of their different methodological approaches to vocabulary extraction, the three lists under focus only share between 15% and 40% of their respective academic verbs. The major differences lie in the inclusion or not of high-frequency verbs (the AKL is the only list containing the verbs choose, show and use, for example), verbs that are less frequent (the AWL lists verbs such as disestablish, labor, and source) and verbs that do not show an even distribution across disciplines (the AVL lists, for example, the verbs calibrate, irrigate, and venerate). To better cater for EAP students’ needs, this paper suggests combining the methodological forces of the AWL, AKL and AVL and carrying out cross-disciplinary phraseological analyses to ensure the relevance of the extracted vocabulary items