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A tutorial by EAPFoundation.com So in today's tutorial we'll be looking at the AWL or Academic Word List
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The tutorial is divided into two parts. In the first part I'll give you a very brief overview of the AWL
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Then I'll be demonstrating the three most popular AWL highlighters on the web
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Lakes Luter, the Nottingham University Highlighter, from the highlighter on EAPFoundation.com. So let's begin by taking a quick look at what the AWL is
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The AWL was developed by Averill Coxhead, an academic working at Victoria University of Wellington
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The AWL consists of 570 word families. It covers around 10% of words in academic texts
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This may not sound like much, but the AWL excludes words in the GSL or General Service list
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which are the most common words in English, and account for about 80% of words in written texts
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So, if you know those words, plus the AWL words, that's around 90% coverage
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The AWL is dividing into 10 lists, called sublists. This is done according to frequency Let look at the words in sublist 1 beginning with yse That the word and you can see that it has many different word forms like ytically ytical yst and so on
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So each of the 570 word families may have many different word forms
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which means thousands of individual words. And if we go down, we come to Sublis 2, beginning with Achieve
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I go down again to Alternative in Sublis 3. You can already see there are a lot of words here
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Let's keep going down. Down. Down. All the way to the end of Sublist 10
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A lot of words. And that's why the AWL highlighters are so important
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because they enable you to study words in context, rather than learning boring lists with thousands of words
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So let's move on to the second and main part of the tutorial, which is the highlighters
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To use the highlighters, we need a text, any text. I'm going to choose part of the page on cause and effect from eapfoundation.com
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It's the example essay. So I just going to highlight that and copy then paste it into each of the highlighters Lex Tudor first with this one we have to delete the instructions then paste then hit the yellow submit button
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let's finish now pretty quick we'll look at the results later so next the Nottingham University highlighter with this one you need to remember
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to select the level you want choose level 10 to highlight all the words in the
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AWL then paste the text in then submit this one can be pretty
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slow so we're still waiting still waiting okay finished at last finally the
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EAP foundation dot com highlighter again paste in the text then click submit this
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one is undoubtedly the quickest of the three so it's done already let's now
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look at each of the highlighters in more detail this is the Lex Tudor one you can
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see there's some interesting data at the top if we scroll down we can see the
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highlighted words are on the right the words in yellow are from the AWL. The first word off screen here is domestic, then liberation, then
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transformed, also off screen, significant consequences. If we scroll down past the blue words
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which are GSL words we come to the words categorized by sublist We can see sublist 1 2 3 down to 6 This sample text has no words in sublist 7 to 10
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You can actually see that there are some repetitions. Consequence twice, domestic
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That's because those words appear twice in the text. Let's now look at the Nottingham University highlighter
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This time there are no sublists, so that information is missing. We can see the same words highlighted as before
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The Nottingham site does have another useful AWL tool but on a different page
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Let's hit the back button and take a look. It's the AWL gap maker. Again remember to choose level 10 for all the AW words. Paste and submit
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This page is also very slow because the information is sent to the university website and back again
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Okay, so there's a result. It's the original text, but the AWL words have been replaced by blanks
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The AWL words are listed at the bottom. A very useful tool for students and teachers
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Finally then back to the EAPFoundation.com highlighter. One fantastic feature of this site is that it allows you to change the color of words in different sublists
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So, for example, I can change the words from sublist 1 red
