Vocabulary

The General Service List (GSL) What is the GSL? The GSL, or General Service List, is a list of words which were chosen because they were thought to be of greatest ‘general’ use to learners of English. How frequently they occur in English was one factor which was considered when selecting the words. The original […]

Academic Word List (AWL) The Academic Word List (AWL), developed by Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, contains 570 word families which frequently appear in academic texts, but which are not contained in the General Service List (GSL). When compiling the list, the author found that the AWL covers around 10% of […]

What is the ACL? The Academic Collocation List (ACL) is a list containing 2,469 of the most frequent and useful collocations used in written academic English. The ACL was developed by Kirsten Ackermann and Yu-Hua Chen using the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE), with advice from English teaching experts to ensure the collocations […]