Academic Reading 1 and 2 (2008) AWL Weekly Word Lists Overview These AWL Weekly Word Lists cover all the words listed in Academic Word List (AWL). There are 570 words in AWL (cf. Reading Skills for Success, p. 5 and p. 148) and each ALW Weekly Word List contains 30 words. If you learn these 570 words and their related words, you will be able to read over 86 percent of academic textbooks. These words will be tested in the standardized final test at the end of each semester. At first sight, you may think that most of the words look familiar because you will have probably studied them before. However, the words in the list are used in many different and sometimes unusual ways. Therefore, you should carefully study how to use the words in their different forms, and also what other words appear with them. For example, look at the following sentence: The lookout was able to see the iceberg only moments before the ship struck it. The keyword here is able. You will also see that the following to is in italics, which shows that able appears with to in the phrase able to <VERB>. This is the kind of pattern that you should be paying attention to when studying these words.
Key to AWL Weekly Word List entries (4) (5)
(1) (2)
(6) (3)
(7)
(1) entry number (2) keyword (3) IPA pronunciation (4) Weekly Word List number (5) keyword level (AWL) (6) examples of keyword from Appendix 1 in the textbook. Common words that appear with the keyword are marked in italics. (7) examples of keyword from the British National Corpus (BNC). This is a huge database of British newspapers articles, magazine articles, television reports, and so on. Common words that appear with the keyword are also marked in italics.