Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research papers

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that have been published in five applied linguistics journals, namely, Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, Second Language Research, and TESOL Quarterly. Results show that AWL words account for 11.17% of the entire ALC. Using both frequency and range as the criteria for word forms selection, this study identifies 475 AWL and 128 non-AWL word forms that are used more than 50 times in the ALC and at least five times across the five journals. Most of the AWL word forms belong to the word families included in Coxhead’s first and second sublists. The non-AWL word forms are specialized terms in applied linguistics, terms related to language education and research methodology, and adjectives/nouns indicating countries/languages. Pedagogical implications are made for both teachers and learners of academic English as a foreign language.