Teaching English in Japan

A compiled table of Averil Coxhead's AWL (Academic Word List), with headwords followed by other words in the family. For example, for the headword "academy", the family is: academia, academic, academically, academics, academies. Each entry links to a kwic concordance of the headword.

This is a collection of English vocabulary word lists with online activities that use these word lists.

A list of 500 vocabulary words (with definitions) for students preparing for academic English exams. (This list is from a CD/Workbook that uses hip-hop music to increase students vocabulary.)

The General Service List (GSL) is a list of 2,000 words that was first published in 1953. These words were chosen to be the vocabulary basis of material for learners of English as a second language. A lot of teaching material, including graded readers, was produced based on this list. Until recently, this list was often used in research on second language acquisition, so it is frequently cited in journals. Nevertheless, the list is out of print and can be difficult to find. (Quoted text from the web page.)

A 5500-word adaptation of West\'s 2000 headword GSL. Additions include differetn verb forms (e.g. work, works, working), plurals (book, books), the months, days of the week and numbers. (Additions quoted from the web site.)

Vocabulary Profilers break texts down into frequency categories, as determined by the frequency of words in the language at large.

This companion website for Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus (authors Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson; 2001) provides list of texts and their categories, frequency lists, and PDF downloadable samples from the book. The sample pages include a frequency comparison of the names of days -- which day do you think is most-mentioned? The least-mentioned? (Hint: One of the answers is Tuesday.)

Four sets of word frequency lists. One is 2000 most most frequent words from a variety of sources. The second one is the word lists that are part of Paul Nation's VocabProfile program. The third set includes two lists of words for "academic" study, i.e. as preparation for getting into university. The fourth is a lemmatized list of the first 2000 words (headwords only) for students to learn from.