This page describes the Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL), giving information on what the ASWL is, some ideas on how to use the list, as well as a complete list of all words in the ASWL.

What is the ASWL?

The Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL), developed by Thi Ngoc Yen Dang, Averil Coxhead and Stuart Webb in 2017, is a list of 1,741 word families essential for understanding academic speech (lectures, seminars, labs, and tutorials) in English-medium universities. It was created to help second language learners improve their listening comprehension.

The list was developed from a 13-million-word corpus of real academic speech across 24 subjects, from four sub-corpora (hard-pure, hard-applied, soft-pure, and soft-applied). For inclusion in the list, a word family had to occur in all four sub-corpora and at least 12 out of 24 subjects, ensuring the list is useful for learners regardless of their specific field of study.

Comprehension of these word families provides approximately 90% coverage of academic speech. When combined with proper nouns (e.g. John, London) and marginal words (e.g. ah, hmm), learners can reach 92-96% coverage, which reaches the 95% threshold for comfortable listening comprehension.

The list is graded into four levels aligned with the BNC/COCA frequency lists. For example, Level 1 corresponds to 1k in the BNC/COCA, i.e. the most frequent 1,000 words. This allows learners and teachers to focus on words appropriate to their current vocabulary level. If learners have already mastered the most frequent 1,000 words of general English, they can skip Level 1 and focus on Levels 2 to 4 of the ASWL. If they have mastered the most frequent 2,000 words, they can focus on Levels 3 and 4, and so on. To measure learners’ general vocabulary knowledge, teachers can use vocabulary tests such as the updated Vocabulary Levels Test (Webb et al., 2017) or the Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (McLean et al., 2015).

The following table shows how many word families are contained in each level.

ASWL level	Number of word families	Note
Level 1	830	Items in these levels are academic spoken words that are also general high-frequency words.
Level 2	456
Level 3	380
Level 4	75	Items in this level are academic spoken words that are general mid and low-frequency words.

How to use the ASWL?

For effective use of the ASWL, consider these study strategies.

• Learn Word Families, Not Just Headwords. Each headword (e.g. analyse) represents a family of related forms (e.g. analyses, analysed, analysing, analysis, analyst). Try to learn these family members together to expand your vocabulary efficiently.
• Study Words in Context. To truly know a word, you need to encounter and use it. Try to read and listen to more academic materials, and practice using new words in your own speaking and writing.
• Set Goals and Keep Going. Aim for 95% coverage of academic speech by mastering the appropriate ASWL level for you. After that, continue to expand your vocabulary for even better comprehension.

For learning purposes, students can follow the ASWL sub-lists of 50 items ranked by frequency in academic spoken English. These sub-lists are available via the Open Science Framework and the IRIS digital repository.

References

Dang, T. N. Y., Coxhead, A., and Webb, S. (2017). The Academic Spoken Word List. Language Learning, 67(4), 959–997. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lang.12253 (Access date 7/2/26).

McLean, S., Kramer, B., and Beglar, D. (2015). The creation and validation of a listening vocabulary levels test. Language Teaching Research, 19(6), 741-760. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168814567889.

Webb, S., Sasao, Y., and Ballance, O. (2017). The updated Vocabulary Levels Test: Developing and validating two new forms of the VLT. ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 168(1), 34-70.

Academic Spoken Word List

The list below contains all 1,741 headwords in the ASWL, along with related word forms, sorted alphabetically in each level. Words contain hyperlinks to the Wordnet dictionary, hosted on this site (definitions open in an alert box on the same page).

There is also a copy of the list sorted by frequency.