A Corpus-based Comparison between the Academic Word List and the Academic Vocabulary List

This study was a corpus-based comparison between two lists of academic words: 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 self-created 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. Implications, limitations, and suggestions are listed for future research