The Academic Word List and Reporting Verbs Video Lecture

I’m going to show you a couple of resources that will be helpful to you in your academic writing. The first is called the Academic Word List and it’s sometimes abbreviated as AWL. The Academic Word List is a list of the most frequent words used in academics in English. And the list was developed by a woman in New Zealand who did research and came up with the list. Her name is Averil Coxhead. This list will especially be useful to non-native English speakers who may not be familiar with all of the words on the list. It can also be useful to native English speakers, if you have trouble writing in a formal tone and then I’m also gonna show you some resources for reporting verbs. Academic reporting verbs are words used to introduce your sources in academic writing. You’ll find some of these reporting verbs on the Academic Word List, so there’s a little bit of overlap here. All of this is about appropriate language to use in your academic writing. The Academic Word List is an online resource that you can use for vocabulary building and it’s easy to find if you just go to Google and search for Academic Word List, you can see that there are lots of websites for Academic Word List. The one you want to go to is the original one for the person who created the Academic Word List and that’s at Victoria University. And on this page, you’ll see that the Academic Word List was created by Averil Coxhead. She did all the research and came up with these academic terms that are used in academic classes and she divided all of the words into these sublists. So if you click on Sublist Families, there’s a PDF. And you get these lists of academic words. Now this research is done so well that you get a word and all of its family members. These are all the words in the family of analyze. Now, sublist 1 is the list of most frequent words. So if you learn these words, you’ll find all of these common in academic English. And then there’s sublist 2. These are not as common as sublist one, but they’re still very common and you can see here that there are ten sublist families. That would give you ten sets of vocabulary that you would want to study. And if you read a little more on the website like right here it says, there are 60 families in each sublist. That gives you an idea how many words that you would need to learn. If you’re not a native speaker of English, this would be a great resource for you to study. So on this website, we have the list of vocabulary and you could make flash cards or just look them up in a dictionary and make sure that you know them all. But then also if you do Google searches and you get all of those sources for Academic Word List, you can also find some exercises to help you practice. This is one that I’ve used in my classes for students to practice the Academic Word List. You see you can review the different sublists right here, and if you click on one of them, there are exercises and the words are grouped. So, in Exercise 1a, this would be Sublist 1 and Group 1 and then there’s an exercise to practice. You read the list and you can choose which word is appropriate to go in that blank. And when you do this exercise, then you can check your answers. So this is a good way to check your knowledge of these very useful academic words. These are all very common in English speaking college classes and why am I talking about them? Well, that’s because these are good words to put into your research papers as well. This is the kind of appropriate language you would want to use. This is the first sublist right here. Remember, you don’t want to use informal language like slang and cliches. Here are just a few examples of how using the Academic Word List can help you improve your word choice. On the left, we have some informal language. And on the right, we have a word from the academic word list that replaces one of the informal words or phrases on the left side. If you use the words from the Academic Word List, you’ll know that you’re using an academic tone. Now let me mention one other thing that you can look for online. These are the academic reporting verbs. If you search for academic reporting verbs, again, you’ll find a long list of web pages that you can use and pretty much any of these will work. Let’s just look at the first PDF here from Adelaide University. And there’s a little bit of an explanation of what the academic reporting verbs are and then you have a chart and there’s good information in this chart above the verbs. Here in the white spaces, these are academic reporting verbs. And over here, it tells what the verb does. So if you wanted to show that your source is in agreement with a point that you’re making in your paper, these are some of the academic reporting verbs that you should use to introduce the quote or the paraphrase. You could say that the source accepts this position or the source confirms such and such. If you wanted to show a stronger position, you would use one of these verbs. The source supports such and such position or praises this position. These are words that you should use to introduce your quotes, instead of the word say or said. Say and says are not very academic and you can see there are a lot of other words you can use instead, these are more expressive. If I say that the source said something, you don’t know how he feels about that. But if I say that he praised something, you’ll know that he’s in strong agreement with it. On the other hand, if I said that he doubts something, then that would show that he doesn’t necessarily agree with something. So you always want to use academic reporting verbs when you’re integrating your sources. And again, there are lots of things on the Internet you can use. That was one site. Any of these others would give you similar charts. I don’t know how many academic reporting verbs there are, but there are a lot. Find the resource that you like best. If you’re studying in the US, you might want to find one that’s from an American university, so it has American spellings. Here’s one from a university in Tacoma, that’s in Washington state in the US. And so there’s more information about reporting verbs. And again, a chart and it lists the verb on the left and then gives you an example of how to use that in a sentence. This chart’s a little shorter, so maybe it’s not as intimidating as that first one that we looked at. Again, those are called academic reporting verbs and they’re used to introduce your sources in your academic writing.