EAWL | EAWL

This is the project website for the Economics Academic Word List (EAWL), a discipline-specific academic word list for the teaching-learning of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). The EAWL contains 887 words (or 1,763 word forms) which cover around 5.5% of economics academic texts, both professionally written (see Figure 1) and student written (see Figure 2). The EAWL provides a more nuanced account of academic vocabulary in economics than generic academic word lists which do not account for disciplinary variation. The EAWL can be used to set vocabulary learning goals or to develop materials for the teaching-learning of the academic vocabulary of economics. This website hosts links to a range of resources and ready-made teaching-learning materials which will be particularly useful to teachers and learners of ESAP in the economics disicplines.

Figure 1. Word list coverage of DOAJ Economics subcorpus (journal articles)

Figure 2. Word list coverage of the BAWE Economics subcorpus (student assignments)

UPDATE October 2020

EAWL Version 1.1 (click to download as .txt file)

A new and improved version of the EAWL (v1.1) is now available to download. This version of the EAWL contains only the 848 words (or 1,688 word forms) which occur in a minimum of 100 different texts in the DOAJ Economics subcorpus. The addition of a simple range threshold (>100 texts) has removed some of the more idiosyncratic vocabulary items from the original list, but has not adversely affected its coverage. The EAWL v1.1 contains 39 fewer words but still covers 5.4% of the DOAJ Economics subcorpus (compared to the 5.5% of the original EAWL) and 5.4% of the BAWE Economics subcorpus (compared to 5.4% of the original EAWL).

EAWL teaching-learning resources

EAWL highlighter and gapfill maker (click for link)

This tool was developed by Sheldon Smith of EAP Foundation. It can be used to quickly and easily identify economics academic words in any text. Classroom texts, for example, can be pasted into the Word Finder to reveal the most important and useful academic words for economics students, or to make printable gapfill exercises. This is extremely useful for students, teachers and course designers attempting to select teaching-learning materials, set vocabulary learning goals or generally focus academic vocabulary learning activities. The EAWL highlighter also provides frequency information, e.g. words in sublist 1 are the most frequent in economics texts, while words in sublist 9 are the least frequent.

EAWL Quizlet (click for link)

The EAWL Quizlet set is based on the 100 most frequent EAWL words. It uses definitions from Google Dictionary and, importantly, authentic examples from a 20-million word economics corpus. The EAWL Quizzer enables students to study EAWL words through a variety of games and activities and then to test themselves. This tool will be extremely useful for students wishing to conduct independent vocabulary learning activities.

Other EAWL resources:

Click here to view the full EAWL at EAP Foundation. This list includes sublist data and dictionary definitions.
Click here to download the full EAWL with frequencies (in the DOAJ Economics subcorpus) as a .pdf file.
Click here to download the full EAWL as a .txt file.
Click here to download the EAWL sublists as a .zip file.

More information regarding the development of the EAWL can be found in:

O'Flynn, J. (2019). An Economics Academic Word List (EAWL): Using online resources to develop a subject-specific word list and associated teaching-learning materials. Journal of Academic Language and Learning. 13 (1)

If you have any questions regarding the EAWL please contact James O'Flynn at james.a.oflynn@gmail.com