This page describes the Academic Keyword List (AKL), giving information on what the AKL is, how it differs from the AWL and other lists, as well as providing a complete list of all words in the AKL.

What is the AKL?

The Academic Keyword List (AKL) is a list of academic words developed in 2010 by Magali Paquot as part of a research project at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. The list contains 930 words that are frequent in a wide range of academic texts, though which occur relatively infrequently in other kinds of text. The tendency of words to appear more frequently in one kind of text than another is also called keyness, and leads to the name of the list, the Academic Keyword List, since it identifies keywords in academic (vs. non-academic) texts.

In identifying keywords in this way, the AKL includes some high frequency words that appear in the General Service List (GSL) which are important for academic writers, but which are missing from the Academic Word List (AWL), since the AWL excludes words from the GSL. Examples are: advance, advantage, classification, comparison, examination, experiment, explanation, influence, reference, population, recognition, reduction, review, and society. Exclusion of such words has been one of the criticisms of the AWL, and has led to other lists being devised using a similar principle of inclusion by keyness, such as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) of Gardner and Davies, which was compiled in 2013, a few years after the AKL.

In addition to keyness, range and evenness of distribution among academic texts were also taken into account when compiling the list.

How does the AKL differ from the AWL and other lists?

One difference between the AKL and the AWL, the inclusion of high frequency general words from the GSL, has already been highlighted.

Another difference is the fact that the AKL is intended primarily for productive use (writing), rather than receptive use (reading), as is the case for the AWL.

A third difference is that the AKL lists only keywords, not word families or other forms. In this regard it differs not only from the AWL, which lists word families, but also from the AVL, which lists inflected forms (e.g. plurals or verb inflections) of words in the list.

References

Banister, C. (2016), 'The Academic Word List: Exploring Teacher Practices, Attitudes and Beliefs Through a Web-Based Survey and Interviews', The Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 309-325.

Paquot, M. (2010). Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing: From Extraction to Analysis. London & New-York: Continuum, 56-58.

The Academic Keyword List (AKL)

The list below contains all words in the AKL, sorted by word form, then in alphabetical order. There are 353 nouns, 233 verbs, 180 adjectives, 87 adverbs, and 75 other forms (in that order). As such, the list actually contains 928 words, not 930. The table below also indicates whether the word occurs in the GSL or AWL, and whether it occurs in the AVL. In total, 460 words appear in the GSL (49.6%), 359 appear in the AWL (38.7%) and 109 appear in neither list (11.7%). A total of 595 (64.1%) of words appear in the AVL.

Words contain hyperlinks to the Wordnet dictionary, hosted on this site (definitions open in an alert box on the same page).