Academic Vocabulary: What It Is and How to Learn It

Search for academic vocabulary and you will mostly find lists. A list is a fair place to start, but it hides the real picture. Academic vocabulary is not one pile of hard words. It is a layer of general language that turns up again and again in university reading and writing, whatever the subject, and the way you learn it matters more than the list you pick.

Three layers of words

It helps to sort the words in an academic text into three layers.

Everyday words. Most of the running text is ordinary language. Averil Coxhead, who built the best-known list of academic words, notes that West's General Service List of the 2,000 most useful word families covers up to 76 percent of the academic texts she studied. These are the words you probably know already: study, result, change, group.

Academic words. The next layer is made of words that are not in those first 2,000 families but appear across many subjects. Coxhead's examples include substitute, underlie, establish and inherent. Her Academic Word List has 570 word families, and together they account for about 10 percent of the words in academic texts, against 1.4 percent in a collection of fiction of the same size. In other words, roughly one word in ten in an academic text comes from that short list.

Subject words. The last layer belongs to a field: photosynthesis in biology, amendment in law. You usually meet these in a course, with a definition from the teacher or the textbook. They are worth learning, but they do not travel from one subject to another.

The middle layer is where a learner with academic goals gets the best return, because it is useful in every course. Coxhead made her list for exactly this reason: it shows learners "which words are most worth studying". The longer story of how that list was built is in what the Academic Word List is.

What a list can and cannot do

A list tells you which words are common. It does not tell you how those words behave in a sentence, which words they like to sit next to, or how formal they sound. Learning a list as a set of one-word definitions is a slow way to get a long way from the skill you want, which is to read a journal article without stopping every line, and to write a paragraph that sounds like it belongs in one.

Use a list as a map of what to look out for. Then learn the words the way you meet them: in sentences, in families and in phrases.

Learn words as families

A word family is a base word and its related forms. Analyze, analysis, analyst, analytical and analytically are one family. Learning one form and the rules for the others gives you five words for the price of about two.

This matters because academic writing relies on nouns. A writer turns we analyzed the data into the analysis of the data so the action can become the subject of a sentence. That is why the endings that make nouns are so useful, and why the -tion and -sion endings repay a little study. When you meet a new academic word, write down its family:

Not every word has every form, and the blanks are real. Check a dictionary before you invent one.

Learn the phrases, not just the words

Academic English is full of fixed combinations. You conduct research, you do not make it. A study draws a conclusion or provides evidence. Words that go together this way are called collocations, and they are where learners most often sound slightly off even when every single word is correct.

The University of Manchester's Academic Phrasebank is a free collection of this kind of language. It arranges phrases by the part of a paper they belong to: introducing work, referring to sources, describing methods, reporting results, discussing findings and writing conclusions. Browsing the section for the kind of paragraph you are about to write is a quick way to see how the words you are learning really sit in a sentence. The site's own advice is to adapt the phrases to your content and not to paste them in.

Mind the register

Academic writing tends to prefer a precise word over a vague one, and a formal word over a casual one. Get often becomes obtain or receive. Big becomes substantial or considerable. Look at becomes examine. This is a preference, not a rule, and a sentence stuffed with long words reads as badly as one full of slang. Choose the word that says exactly what you mean. Five ways to say important shows how much a single choice can change the claim you make.

A four-week plan

You do not need a heavy schedule. You need a repeating one.

1. Week 1: find your starting point. Read two pages of the kind of text you will face and underline every word you would need to look up. Take a placement test so you know which words are right for your level and which are too far ahead.
2. Week 2: build families. Pick five academic words a day from your reading. For each, write the family and one sentence of your own, and say it out loud.
3. Week 3: add phrases. For the words you have met, find two phrases each in the texts you read or in the Academic Phrasebank. Learn the phrase, not just the word.
4. Week 4: write and test. Write a short paragraph on a topic from your course using at least eight of the words. Then check yourself without notes.

Review matters more than volume. A word you meet once is gone in days. The same word met again after a day, then a few days, then a week is far more likely to stay, which is the idea behind spaced repetition.

Practice set

Fill each gap with the best form, then check the answers below.

1. The ______ of the survey results took two weeks. (analyze / analysis)
2. Researchers often ______ research before they write up their findings. (make / conduct)
3. The argument rests on the ______ that all participants answered honestly. (assume / assumption)
4. A careful writer would choose ______ over big in a formal report. (substantial / huge)
5. Which of these is a subject word, not an academic word: establish, inherent, photosynthesis?

Answers: 1. analysis (a noun is needed after "the"). 2. conduct (research is conducted). 3. assumption (a noun follows "the"). 4. substantial (more formal and more precise). 5. photosynthesis belongs to one field, while the other two appear across many subjects.

Building the habit

Twenty minutes a day for a month beats one long session. Keep your own list of families and phrases from your real reading, and add to it a little at a time. The advice in vocabulary tips for students shows how to fit this around a course load.

How Wordabulary fits in

Wordabulary finds your level with a short placement assessment, then gives you practice and quizzes matched to it, and every word page shows the definition, an example sentence and related forms. You can look up academic words in the word library and hear each one in British or American English. It works best next to your own reading and writing.