




































 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 77 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

How Accurately do English for Academic Purposes Students Use  

Academic Word List Words? 

 

Kim McDonough 

Concordia University 

 

Heike Neumann 

Concordia University 

 

Nicolas Hubert-Smith 

Concordia University 

 

Abstract 

 

Previous corpus research on English for academic purposes (EAP) writing has analyzed how 

often additional language (L2) writers use words from the Academic Word List (AWL) 

(Coxhead, 2000), but few studies to date have explored how accurately those words are used. 

Therefore, the current study investigated how accurately and appropriately EAP writers (N = 

409) use AWL words in their argumentative essays. The 230,694-word corpus was analyzed to 

identify AWL word families that occurred with at least 20 tokens. All tokens were then coded as 

being accurately used, or as containing a morphosyntactic or collocational error (or both). The 

findings showed that the EAP students’ overall accuracy rate was high (67%) and that 

collocational errors occurred more frequently than grammatical errors. Pedagogical implications 

for EAP programs are discussed. 

 

Introduction 

 

International student enrolment at Canadian universities for long-term studies (more than six 

months) has more than doubled since 2008, posting an annual growth rate of 10.9% between 

2008 and 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2017). In British Columbia, for example, approximate 

enrolment rates for international students in both undergraduate and graduate degree programs 

range from 25% (University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University) to 21% 

(University of Victoria) and 16% (Thompson Rivers University). In addition to the university 

sector, international K-12 student enrolment has increased by 50% in the past five years, with 

approximately 20,000 students attending public and private schools in British Columbia (Zeidler, 

2017). Reflecting the importance of academic literacy for these students in secondary and post-

secondary settings, English for academic purposes (EAP) programs provide instruction that 

focuses on the English language needs and practices associated with academic settings (Hyland 

& Hamp-Lyons, 2002). Their overarching goal is to help students develop the communicative 

behaviours needed in academic settings, such as interacting with peers and instructors, 

comprehending lectures, reading academic texts, and producing text-responsible writing that 

accurately reflects source text information (Leki & Carson, 1997). Although EAP programs have 

been traditionally associated with university settings, they are relevant for students at all levels of 

formal schooling (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002). University-level EAP programs follow a 

variety of models, including intensive programs that students complete prior to beginning their 

degree courses (e.g., UBC English Language Institute’s EAP program), bridging programs that 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 78 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

combine intensive language study along with one or two disciplinary courses (e.g., UBC 

Okanagan's English Language Foundation Program), and simultaneous enrolment in EAP and 

sheltered undergraduate degree programs (e.g., UBC's Vantage College). In the current study, 

EAP students took credit-bearing EAP courses at the same time as disciplinary courses related to 

their undergraduate degree programs at a large public university in the province of Québec. 

 

Background 

 

Regardless of their educational level or program type, EAP students face a major challenge in 

learning the academic vocabulary that will allow them to both comprehend and produce 

academic texts throughout their study programs. To facilitate the principled study of academic 

vocabulary, Coxhead (2000) developed the Academic Word List (AWL) to identify key 

academic words across disciplines, thereby making them more salient to students and providing 

instructors with a focus for vocabulary study. Since the AWL’s first publication, it has featured 

prominently in English learner’s dictionaries and EAP teaching materials (Coxhead, 2011). Both 

proponents of the AWL (e.g. Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 2013) and EAP material developers 

drawing on the list (e.g. Douglas, 2018; Schmitt & Schmitt, 2005) have argued that by drawing 

on the AWL, instructors can help their students develop their academic vocabulary effectively 

and efficiently.  

 

The long list of EAP materials and dictionaries cited by Coxhead (2011) clearly points to 

the popularity and wide spread use of the AWL. However, the AWL is not without its critics. 

One criticism of the AWL concerns the way that it was originally compiled. Coxhead (2000) 

relied on the General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) when preparing the AWL and excluded 

words frequently occurring in the academic corpus if they appeared on the GSL. This resulted in 

high-frequency GSL academic words, such as exchange, interest, or rate, not being included on 

the AWL (Gardner & Davies, 2013). Furthermore, since the GSL is based on a corpus from the 

first half of the 1900s, its word frequencies may not reflect current usage (Hancioğlu, Neufeld, & 

Eldridge, 2008). Second, despite Coxhead’s (2000) claim that the AWL is relevant for all 

academic disciplines, the list has been criticized for not being as general as one might assume. 

Although Hyland and Tse (2007, 2009) agreed with the pedagogical principles underlying the 

creation of the AWL, they also argued that the AWL creates the illusion of a uniform academic 

vocabulary that is used in a similar fashion across the disciplines when this is actually not the 

case. Their claim is also supported by research projects that devised academic word lists for 

specific disciplines ranging from agriculture (Martínez, Beck, & Panza, 2009) and applied 

linguistics (Khani & Tazik, 2013) to environmental studies (Liu & Han, 2015), medicine (Lei & 

Liu, 2016, Wang, Liang, & Ge, 2008), and nursing (Yang, 2015). These discipline-specific lists 

all diverge from the AWL and differ from each other in terms of the most frequently used words, 

or at least in the order in which words appear on these different lists, which raises questions 

about the relevance of the AWL across disciplines.  

 

Despite these criticisms, the AWL is still a useful tool for EAP instructors who teach 

students from a variety of academic disciplines in general EAP courses rather than discipline-

specific English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. It offers instructors a more practical 

approach to focused vocabulary study than the specialized lists advocated by Hyland and Tse 

(2007, 2009). The discipline-specific academic vocabulary lists assume that instructors teach 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 79 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

homogenous classes with students belonging to only one academic discipline. However, this is 

not the case in all EAP contexts as instructors may have students not only from different majors 

within a faculty but also from different faculties (e.g., natural sciences, social sciences, business, 

and fine arts). The rational for these general EAP classes is to provide students with foundational 

academic writing skills that can later be refined in discipline specific ESP or content courses 

(Hyland, 2006). The AWL is a useful tool in a general EAP course since instructors can meet 

their students’ needs by focusing on common underlying academic vocabulary rather than trying 

to anticipate the discipline-specific vocabulary that their students may encounter in their 

academic content courses (Eldridge, 2008). 

 

Academic vocabulary use has been investigated using corpus-based tools to investigate a 

range of issues in EAP writing, such as comparing English first language (L1) and additional 

language (L2) students’ language use (Chen & Baker, 2010; Hinkel, 2002; Paquot, 2010), 

describing the lexio-grammatical features of EAP students’ writing over time (Crosthwaite, 

2016) or by L1 background and genre (Staples & Reppen, 2016), identifying the occurrence of 

multi-word or formulaic constructions (Liu, 2012; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010), and exploring 

the lexical threshold for entry-level undergraduate writing (Douglas, 2013). However, these 

corpus-based studies did not evaluate the accuracy or appropriateness of the words identified 

through the analysis, instead assuming that the writers used the words correctly and 

appropriately. When appropriateness has been examined through a learner corpus, the goal was 

to understand the reasons for incorrect lexical choices in a context where all learners shared the 

same L1 (Hasselgren, 1994) rather than assess the writers’ overall accuracy. Similarly, when 

collocations or lexical bundles have been examined, the purpose was to describe rather than 

assess the appropriateness of learners’ use of collocations (Paquot, 2010). 

 

To our knowledge, corpus research has not examined whether AWL words are used 

accurately or appropriately. However, some corpus studies have examined L2 academic writers’ 

lexical accuracy by focusing on multi-word units. For example, in their comparative study of 

English L1 and L2 academic writing, Liu and Shaw (2001) classified different usages of the verb 

make, including their judgement of collocational errors in which the verb was incorrectly placed 

in a larger phrasal unit (e.g., *make him to angry). Although the L2 writers’ error rate was 

relatively low (6.1-7.9%), their errors involved the use of make with a variety of word 

combinations, including verb + noun, verb + object and compliment, and verb + object and 

infinitive. Taking a similar approach, Nesselhauf (2003) examined the accuracy of the verb + 

noun combinations (e.g., *give a solution to) produced by L2 English writers. Based on native 

speaker corrections of the verb + noun combinations, the most frequent error types were the use 

of the wrong verb (e.g., *carry out races), wrong noun (e.g., *close lacks), and usage errors 

where the combination does not exist or was used incorrectly (e.g., *hold children within 

bounds). Also targeting collocational accuracy, Crossley and colleagues (Crossley, Salsbury, & 

McNamara, 2014) analyzed a small corpus of L2 written texts from different proficiency levels 

using computation tools and analytic ratings. They operationalized collocation accuracy in terms 

of whether multi-word units were acceptable and expected, and reported that collocation 

accuracy was predictive of analytic judgements of lexical proficiency. Although these studies did 

not focus specifically on AWL words, they provide insight into difficulty that even advanced L2 

writers face with collocational accuracy.   

 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 80 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

In addition to collocational accuracy, L2 writers may also experience difficulty with 

morpho-syntactic accuracy when using academic vocabulary. Research on lexical errors has 

examined learner’s knowledge of derivational affixes and their relation to the stem word. Studies 

have shown that learners are able to produce all the derivational forms for only a limited range of 

words (Schmitt, 1999) with their derivational knowledge skewed towards nouns and verbs as 

opposed to adjective and adverbs (Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002). Furthermore, the inability to 

produce a derivational form may indicate that acquisition of a word and of its derivations may be 

two separate yet connected systems (Ward & Chuenjundaeng, 2009). While knowledge of a base 

word may facilitate recognition of its derivational members, it remains to be seen if this 

knowledge transfers to accurate written production.  

 

 In summary, previous corpus-based studies of academic vocabulary have typically 

compared the frequency of AWL words in texts from (a) different academic disciplines, (b) L1 

and L2 writers, or (c) different genres. In these studies, the level of accuracy and appropriateness 

of the writers’ word choices was generally not examined. Although the percentage of AWL 

words occurring in a corpus is interesting, the question arises as to how meaningful that number 

is without any information about how accurately and appropriately the words are used. Whereas 

the collocational and morpho-syntactic accuracy of L2 writers’ vocabulary has been examined, 

those studies have not focused specifically on AWL words despite their prevalence in EAP 

instructional materials. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to explore how accurately 

EAP writers use AWL words in terms of both collocational and morphosyntactic accuracy. The 

research question was as follows: How accurately do EAP writers use AWL words when writing 

argumentative essays? 

 

Method 

 

Instructional Setting and Participants 

 

The argumentative essays were written by English L2 students (N = 409) at an English-medium 

university in Québec. The students were taking the second of two EAP reading and writing 

courses offered in a department of education. Whereas the first EAP course focuses on 

paragraph-level writing, the second course targets source-based essay writing. At this university, 

English L2 students are admitted to their degree programs without any further EAP requirements 

if they have a TOEFL iBT score of 90 or an IELTS score of 7. However, if their TOEFL iBT 

score ranges from 75 to 89 or equivalent, they are required to take an in-house, integrated writing 

placement test. Based on their performance, they are exempted from further EAP instruction or 

placed into one of the two EAP courses. While taking EAP courses, the students are 

simultaneously completing disciplinary courses for their undergraduate degree programs, which 

contrasts with the pre-admission EAP program described by Keefe and Shi (2017) in which 

students only had conditional admission to a university program, and had to first complete the 

EAP requirements before taking specific courses in the arts, sciences, or applied sciences. In 

addition, the students’ credits from the EAP courses at the research site count toward their degree 

requirements, and their EAP course grades are included in their overall grade point average.  

 

The English L2 students who wrote the argumentative essays were adults with a mean 

age of 22.7 years (SD = 4.1). They spoke a total of 30 different first languages, with Mandarin 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 81 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

(47%), French (18%), and Arabic (12%) the most frequently reported. They were studying 

degree programs in business (53%), arts and sciences (27%), engineering (16%), and fine arts 

(4%). In terms of proficiency, students reported mean standardized proficiency scores of 6.2 for 

IELTS (SD = .3) and 80.8 for TOEFL iBT (SD = 9.1). The students in the EAP course were 

recruited over four semesters, which was taught by a variety of instructors using the same 

curriculum, textbook, and exams. The students were required to complete two writing midterm 

exams (summaries and cause/effect essays), as well as the argumentative essays analyzed here, 

which were written as their final exams. The participants agreed to give the researchers access to 

their essays after the EAP course ended.  

 

The students’ EAP course materials consisted of a course pack with reading texts and 

vocabulary activities from the following two sources: Learning English for Academic Purposes 

(Williams, 2012) and Focus on Vocabulary: Mastering the Academic Word List (Schmitt & 

Schmitt, 2005). It contained five units tailored to the three instructional goals of the class: to 

improve the students’ theme-based academic reading skills, to build their knowledge of 

academic vocabulary and sentence structure, and to help develop their academic writing skills. 

Each theme-based unit contained academic texts that presented different perspectives or angles 

on the theme. AWL words were presented in context in the reading passages and developed 

further through vocabulary exercises (e.g., fill-in-the-blank, matching, creating definitions, and 

writing short sentences) from selected chapters in the Schmitt and Schmitt textbook (2005). 

Some AWL words also appeared in subsequent chapters, either in the same form, a form within 

the same word family, or as part of a collocation.  

 

Procedure 

 

The students wrote the argumentative essays as a three-hour final exam following the assessment 

procedures designed and implemented by the EAP program. As part of these procedures, 

approximately two weeks prior to the final exam the students received a list of six readings in the 

EAP course pack that were relevant to the exam topic. They were allowed to prepare for the 

exam by taking notes about the six readings and by bringing their notes to the exam (one page of 

notes per reading). At the examination, students received two writing prompts related to those 

readings and selected which one they preferred to write about. Across the dataset, the essays 

were written in response to prompts that addressed ways of alleviating poverty and hunger (n = 

249) or reducing economic inequality (n = 160). Students had three hours to write the essays by 

hand, during which time they could consult a paper-based monolingual English dictionary and 

their notes.  

 

Analysis 
 

The students’ handwritten argumentative essays were typed, verified, de-identified, and saved as 

Microsoft Word files. Minor spelling errors were corrected so that the words could be recognized 

by the software program. The electronic files were submitted to Cobb’s (2016) Classic 

Vocabulary Profiler, Version 4 (https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng), but any AWL tokens that 

occurred in direct quotations were excluded from the analysis. To ensure that the accuracy 

coding was based on sufficient tokens, AWL word families with fewer than 20 tokens in the 

student essays were excluded. All phrases containing the 60 AWL word family items that met 

https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng


 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 82 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

the inclusion criteria (4369 tokens) were classified as being accurately used or containing an 

error based on the third author's native-speaker judgements. Following several rounds of pilot 

coding of essays not included in the dataset, discussions, and revisions to the coding criteria by 

all three researchers working collaboratively, errors were further coded by the third author into 

three types: collocation, morphosyntax, or both morphosyntax and collocation errors (see Table 1 

for examples). Collocational errors included incorrect lexical chunks or collocations, missing or 

incorrect function words and prepositions, and contextually inappropriate use (i.e. a word with 

related, but not completely overlapping meaning would have been more appropriate). 

Morphosyntactic errors included incorrect use of inflectional and derivational morphology on the 

AWL tokens, such as missing or oversupplied plurals, tense/aspect features, and word form 

errors. Phrases with AWL tokens that had both error types were coded as morphosyntactic and 

collocational errors. A subset of the essays (10%) was coded by the second author for interrater 

reliability. Interrater reliability was .88 as assessed using a two-way mixed average-measures 

interclass correlation coefficient.  

 

Table 1 

 

Accuracy Coding for Phrases with AWL Tokens in the Student Essays 

Sentence Error type 

We cannot DENY it’s still the most effective way to reduce poverty.  None 

Although increasing funding cannot stimulate economic growth rapidly, 

it slowly ALTER the social conditions of capitalism. 

Morphosyntactic  

Direct investment can help starved REGION overcome difficult of 

geography to against hunger. 

Morphosyntactic 

Obviously increasing funding can alter the social structure and benefit 

VIRTUALLY equal across all income groups.  

Collocation 

However, the top PRIORITY of alleviating poverty is to increase public 

services. 

Collocation 

People can’t avoid the CONTRIBUTE of microcredit, but it still can’t 

solve the basic social problem 

Morphosyntactic 

& collocation 

Microcredit cannot ENSURED for reach every poor people, and really 

improve their lifes. 

Morphosyntactic 

& collocation 

Note. AWL tokens have been capitalized.  

 

Results 

 

The students’ argumentative essays (N = 409) had a mean length of 567 words (SD = 112) and 

yielded a corpus with a total size of 230,694 words. There were 202 AWL word families with 

5390 tokens in the students’ argumentative essays. The number of AWL word families per essay 

ranged from 7 to 62, with a mean of 25.5 families (SD = 8.6). The percentage of AWL use 

ranged from 2.1 to 14.9 per essay, with a mean of 7.6% (SD = 2.3). Because the students’ EAP 

course materials targeted AWL words, we also checked to see how many of the AWL word 

families in the essays were also in the course pack. There were 236 AWL word families in the 

EAP course pack, of which 86% (202/236) appeared in the students’ essays. The students 

produced more than 100 tokens for only 11 word families, with invest and benefit most frequent 

(444 and 403, respectively).   



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 83 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

The research question asked whether students used AWL words accurately when writing 

their argumentative essays. As described previously, the accuracy analysis focused on all tokens 

of the 60 AWL word families that occurred at least 20 times in the students’ essays, which 

accounted for 82% of all the AWL tokens (4434/5390). In other words, less than one thousand 

tokens were excluded from the accuracy analysis because a word family failed to meet the 

inclusion criteria. As shown in Table 2, the students’ accuracy rate was high, with 67% of the 

AWL tokens used correctly without any type of error. Collocation errors were more frequent 

than morphosyntactic errors (18% versus 11%, respectively) and errors involving both 

collocational and morphosyntactic issues were rare (4%).  

 

Table 2 

 

AWL Accuracy and Error Rates 

 Sum Percentage 

Accurate 2990 67 

Collocation error 799 18 

Morphosyntactic error 487 11 

Both error types 158 4 

 

 The students produced five AWL word families without any errors: nevertheless, 

select, priority, subsidy, and outcome. At the opposite end of the continuum, families with the 

lowest accuracy percentages were diminish (17%), factor (43%), and aid (43%). For diminish, 

46/55 (84%) of the errors were collocational, specifically contexts where a synonym (e.g., 

reduce, lower, decrease) would have been more appropriate. For example, although its core 

meaning is correct in the sentence to diminish poverty, governments try to solve it using 

microfinance, a synonym would have been more appropriate, such as to reduce poverty. 

Collocational errors were also frequent for factor (64/79 or 81%), such as sentences like also, 

sustainable redistribution is the major factor to make the poor be lazy, where a tensed clause 

would have been more appropriate than the infinitive. However, for aid, morphosyntactic errors 

were more frequent (72/126 or 57%). The most frequent morphosyntactic error was the 

oversuppliance of the plural –s morpheme, as in the sentence: no matter how much aids the 

government gets it cannot make full use of them. Although tokens with both collocational and 

morphosyntactic errors were rare, they occurred most frequently with invest and benefit. For 

example, the following sentence has a collocation error (missing in) as well as a morphosyntactic 

error (invest) by invest factories or manufactures in third world countries, those companies help 

reduce poverty.  

 

Discussion 

 

To summarize the findings, these EAP writers’ use of AWL words was mostly accurate, with 

67% of their tokens used correctly. In terms of error types, students made more collocational 

errors than morphosyntactic errors. In other words, students were able to insert the AWL words 

into the grammatical structure of the sentence using correct derivational forms. However, they 

appeared to struggle with the subtler aspects of word knowledge, such as supplying the correct 

preposition or function word and choosing the most appropriate word when several words can 

have similar but not entirely overlapping meanings. Even frequently used word families followed 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 84 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

this pattern, with six of the 11 words with at least 100 tokens (factor, aid, issue, invest, stable, 

benefit) having relatively low accuracy rates, ranging from 43% to 59%. With the exception of 

aid, tokens with collocational errors were the most frequent, accounting for more than half up to 

three-quarters of all errors. For example, incorrect preposition use (for instead of of) created a 

collocational error with benefit in the following sentence: Even though the benefits for 

investment to poor are obsessed, I still doubt for the poor’s culture values. Similarly, this student 

struggled to incorporate the word invest into her sentence: We must admit that the poor cannot 

manage money and are less willing to invest them in long-term projects. In sum, the findings 

extend those of previous studies that reported the persistence of collocational errors in L2 writing 

(Liu & Shaw, 2001; Nesselhauf, 2003) by demonstrating that AWL word families also pose 

collocational challenges for L2 writers.  

 

Although accuracy rates were generally high (67%), one-third of all the AWL tokens in 

the students’ essays had morphosyntactic or collocational errors (or both). The prevalence of 

these errors raises questions about the typical research approach of reporting AWL word 

frequency without considering whether students use those words accurately and appropriately. 

Comparative studies of L1 and L2 writers may overestimate L2 writers’ ability to use AWL 

words by not considering accuracy. Similarly, comparative genre studies (i.e., comparing 

summary and argumentative texts) may not capture challenges with academic writing by failing 

to consider whether students are equally accurate across genres. By comparing the frequency of 

different error types across genres or over time, researchers can provide instructors with more 

fine-grained information about the developmental progression of EAP writers’ vocabulary use. 

Having more information about when to emphasize specific aspects of word knowledge can help 

instructors design more effective instructional materials. 

 

This study has several pedagogical implications for teaching vocabulary in EAP courses. 

First, the study sheds light on which vocabulary words EAP teachers might focus on with their 

students. When making choices about which AWL words to include on target vocabulary lists, 

instructors may want to highlight words that are relevant for the students’ writing topics. These 

EAP students frequently used AWL word families that were closely linked to their writing topics 

(such as benefit, aid, invest, distribute), but their accuracy rates were relatively low. It is possible 

that students recognized the importance of the key words, which led them to use them often in 

their essays, but they could not successfully incorporate them into their texts in ways that 

avoided errors, especially collocational errors. When working with AWL words in EAP courses, 

instructors could highlight AWL words that have direct semantic links to writing topics, but 

focus on collocational accuracy rather than core word meaning or derivational forms.  

 

Second, the data reveal that beyond mastering the meaning and form of new target 

vocabulary words, the students in this study also faced a challenge in mastering usage of these 

words. Many of the EAP course pack’s vocabulary activities stem from Schmitt and Schmitt’s 

(2005) book. The activities in each chapter are categorized into three groups and include the 

following diverse range of exercise types: 

 

Word Meaning 

 Matching target words with provided definitions 

 Choosing the correct meaning of a target word in context 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 85 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

 Choosing the correct target word to fill a gap in isolated sentences or texts 

 Identifying incorrect synonyms 

 Explaining the meaning of target vocabulary words in own words 

 

Word Families 

 Choosing the correct form of a target word 

 Identifying and correcting errors in word forms 

 

Collocations 

 Choosing the correct collocations of three choices for the target word to fill a gap 

 Writing sentences with one of three collocations for the target word 

 Matching target words with right collocations 

 

Based on the findings from this study, the exercises on word meaning and word families appear 

to be very successful in teaching students about these aspects of vocabulary knowledge as shown 

by the fact that the AWL words were never used completely inaccurately. However, one area 

that students clearly need more help with is the usage of the target words in the context of a 

sentence where students have to pay attention to function words and a broader range of 

collocation information. They also face challenges with determining meaning and usage 

boundaries between target words and other words with a similar or related meaning. As 

previously discussed, the most frequently used word, invest, was often inserted into sentences 

where more appropriate alternatives could have been used. Likewise, the use of issue was 

strongly tied to its collocation with the word poverty. In both cases, students opted to overuse 

familiar words and collocations over less frequent alternatives. 

 

To support students in addressing these difficulties in usage, teachers and EAP material 

developers should perhaps consider including example sentences written by students with these 

types of errors so that students can practice identifying these subtle mistakes in vocabulary 

usage. It might also be worthwhile to contrast these problematic example sentences with 

examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the British National Corpus to 

allow students to appreciate the differences in use between advanced L2 students and more 

proficient users of English. Future research would have to investigate whether such exercises 

would help students improve their level of mastery in using target AWL words in the context of 

their own texts. Furthermore, because prior studies have shown that university L2 writers consult 

dictionaries and concordance tools for different purposes, such as using a dictionary to check the 

form of a word but using concordance tools to search for usage examples (Lai & Chen, 2015), 

additional research should also compare the effectiveness of corpus-based and traditional 

approaches for teaching collocations (e.g., Daskalovska, 2015; Li, 2017).   

 

It is important to note, however, that the current study has a number of limitations that 

may limit its generalizability. First, the study only provides information about the students’ use 

of the 202 AWL target words from the EAP textbook that they decided to use; there is no 

information in the data about the remaining 34 target words that the students did not use in their 

essays. For example, it is possible that they failed to use these words because they were not 

relevant to the assigned source texts and essay topic. Alternatively, it is also possible that the 

students avoided them due to a lack of knowledge about their meaning, form, or usage. If the 



 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 86 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

latter possibility is true, then the students’ ability to use the textbook’s target AWL words may 

not be as strong as the findings reported here suggest. Second, the students had a certain level of 

support when they were writing their essays. Not only did they have access to monolingual 

English dictionaries while writing the essays, but they were also allowed to draw upon the notes 

they had taken about the readings. If students prepared diligently before the exam, they may have 

had the support of key vocabulary in their notes, which may or may not have included some of 

the target AWL words focused on in this study. 

 

Conclusion 

 

In conclusion, the study has found that EAP students use AWL words with a relatively 

high accuracy rate (67%), largely avoiding morphosyntactic and collocational errors. However, 

the prevalence of collocational errors highlighted avenues for improving the pedagogical 

effectiveness of EAP instructional materials for promoting AWL learning. Our future research 

aims to clarify whether including more usage-focused vocabulary activities, recycling target 

words across textbook chapters, and emphasizing collocational knowledge of topic-specific 

AWL words will help EAP students become more proficient at using AWL words. By carrying 

comparative experimental studies that assess developmental outcomes, our goal is to identify 

which types of instructional interventions are most effective at helping EAP students use AWL 

words accurately and appropriately in their own texts.  

 

Acknowledgments 

 

This research was supported by funding from the Canada Research Chairs program, grant 

number 950-221304. We would like to thank the research assistants for their help with data 

collection and preparation: Zachary Alderton, Randy Appel, Jonathan Brouillette, Phung Dao, 

Alexandre Dion, Maxime Lavalee, Matthew Lazenby, and Nora Sargent. 

 

References 

 

Chen, Y.-H., & Baker, P. (2010). Lexical bundles in L1 and L2 academic writing. Language 

Learning & Technology, 14(2), 30-49.  

Cobb. T. (2016). Web VP Classic v.4 [computer program]. Accessed at 

https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng  

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/3587951  

Coxhead, A. (2011). The academic word list 10 years on: Research and teaching implications. 

TESOL Quarterly, 45(2), 355-362. https://doi.org/10.5054/tq.2011.254528  

Crossley, S. A., Salsbury, T., & McNamara, D. S. (2014). Assessing lexical proficiency using 

analytical ratings: A case for collocation accuracy. Applied Linguistics, 36, 570-590. 

https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt056  

Crosthwaite, P. (2016). A longitudinal multidimensional analysis of EAP writing: Determining 

EAP course effectiveness. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 22, 166-178. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.04.005  

https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng
https://doi.org/10.2307/3587951
https://doi.org/10.5054/tq.2011.254528
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt056
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.04.005


 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 87 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

Daskalovska, N. (2015). Corpus-based versus traditional learning of collocations. Computer 

Assisted Language Learning, 28(2), 130-144. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2013.803982  

Douglas, S. R. (2013). The lexical breadth of undergraduate novice level writing competency. 

The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(1), 152-170. Retrieved from 

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/21176  

Douglas, S. R. (2018). Academic inquiry 4: Essays and research (2nd edition). Don Mills, ON: 

Oxford University Press. 

Eldridge, J. (2008). “No, there isn’t’ an ‘academic vocabulary,’ but…”: A reader responds to K. 

Hyland and P. Tse’s “Is there an ‘academic vocabulary’?” TESOL Quarterly, 42(1), 109-

113. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00210.x  

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2013). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 

305-327. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt015  

Hancioğlu, N., Neufeld, S., & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into the land of 

lexico-grammar. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 27(4), 459-479. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2008.08.001  

Hasselgren, A. (1994). Lexical teddy bears and advanced learners: A study into the ways 

Norwegian students cope with English vocabulary. International Journal of Applied 

Linguistics, 4(2), 237-260. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.1994.tb00065.x  

Hinkel, E. (2002). Second language writers' text: Linguistic and rhetorical features. Mahwah, 

NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 

Hyland, K. (2006). English for Academic purposes: An advanced resource book. London: 

Routledge. 

Hyland, K., & Hamp-Lyons, L. (2002). EAP: issues and directions. Journal of English for 

Academic Purposes, 1(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1475-1585(02)00002-4  

Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2007). Is there an “academic vocabulary”? TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 235-

253. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2007.tb00058.x  

Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2009). Academic lexis and disciplinary practice: Corpus evidence for 

specificity. International Journal of English Studies, 9(2), 111-129. Retrieved from 

http://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/view/90781  

Keefe, K., & Shi, L. (2017). An EAP program and students’ success at a Canadian university. 

TESL Canada Journal, 34(2), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v34i2.1264  

Khani, R., & Tazik, K. (2013). Towards the development of an academic word list for applied 

linguistics research articles. RELC Journal, 44(2), 209-232. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688213488432  

Lai, S. L., & Chen, H. J. (2015). Dictionaries vs concordancers: actual practice of the two 

different tools in EFL writing. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 28(4), 341-363. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2013.839567  

Lei, L., & Liu, D. (2016). A new medical academic word list: A corpus-based study with 

enhanced methodology. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 22, 42-53. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.01.008  

Leki, I., & Carson, J. (1997). “Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing Experiences 

of ESL Students in University Courses. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 39-69. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/3587974  

Li, S. (2017). Using corpora to develop learners' collocational competence. Language Learning 

& Technology, 21(3), 153-171. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2017/li.pdf  

https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2013.803982
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/21176
https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00210.x
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt015
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2008.08.001
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.1994.tb00065.x
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1475-1585(02)00002-4
https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2007.tb00058.x
http://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/view/90781
https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v34i2.1264
https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688213488432
https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2013.839567
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.01.008
https://doi.org/10.2307/3587974
http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2017/li.pdf


 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 88 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

Liu, D. (2012). The most frequently-used multi-word constructions in academic written English: 

A multi-corpus study. English for Specific Purposes, 31(1), 25–35. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2011.07.002  

Liu, E., & Shaw, P. (2001). Investigating learner vocabulary: A possible approach to looking at 

EFL/ESL learners’ qualitative knowledge of the word. IRAL, 39(3), 171–194. 

https://doi.org/10.1515/iral.2001.001  

Liu, J., & Han, L. (2015). A corpus-based environmental academic word list building and its 

validity test. Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 39, 1-11. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2015.03.001  

Martínez, I. A., Beck, S. C., & Panza, C. B. (2009). Academic vocabulary in agriculture research 

articles: A corpus-based study. Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 183-198. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.003  

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning vocabulary in another language (2nd edition). Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

Nesselhauf, N. 2003. The use of collocations by advance learners of English and some 

implications for teaching. Applied Linguistics, 24(2), 223-242. 

https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/24.2.223  

Paquot, M. 2010. Academic vocabulary in learner writing. London & New York: Continuum. 

Schmitt, N. (1999). The relationship between TOEFL vocabulary items and meaning, 

association, collocation and word-class knowledge. Language Testing, 16(2), 189-216. 

https://doi.org/10.1191/026553299668017227  

Schmitt, D. & Schmitt, N. (2005). Focus on vocabulary: Mastering the academic word list. 

White Plains, NY: Pearson Education. 

Schmitt, N., & Zimmerman, C. B. (2002). Derivative word forms: What do learners know? 

TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 145-171. https://doi.org/10.2307/3588328  

Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, N. (2010). An academic formulas list: New methods in phraseology 

research. Applied Linguistics, 31(1), 487–512. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amp058  

Staples, S., & Reppen, R. (2016). Understanding first-year L2 writing: A lexico-grammatical 

analysis across L1s, genres, and language ratings. Journal of Second Language Writing, 

32, 17-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2016.02.002  

Statistics Canada (2017). Economic impact of international education in Canada—2017 update. 

Retrieved from http://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/impact-2017/sec-

5.aspx?lang=eng  

Wang, J., Liang, S.-I., & Ge, G.-C. (2008). Establishment of a medical Academic Word List. 

Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 27(4), 442-458. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2008.05.003  

Ward, J., & Chuenjundaeng, J. (2009). Suffix knowledge: Acquisition and applications. System, 

37(3), 461-469. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2009.01.004  

West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longman, Green. 

Williams, J. (2012). Learning English for academic purposes (2nd edition). Montreal, QC: 

Pearson.  

Yang, M.-N. (2015). A nursing academic word list. Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 37, 

27-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.05.003  

Zeidler, M. (2017, September 4). B.C. welcomes record number of international K-12 students. 

CBC News. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-

welcomes-record-number-of-international-k-12-students-1.4271279  

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2011.07.002
https://doi.org/10.1515/iral.2001.001
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2015.03.001
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.003
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/24.2.223
https://doi.org/10.1191/026553299668017227
https://doi.org/10.2307/3588328
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amp058
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2016.02.002
http://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/impact-2017/sec-5.aspx?lang=eng
http://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/impact-2017/sec-5.aspx?lang=eng
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2008.05.003
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2009.01.004
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.05.003
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-welcomes-record-number-of-international-k-12-students-1.4271279
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-welcomes-record-number-of-international-k-12-students-1.4271279


 McDonough, Neumann, & Hubert-Smith 89 

BC TEAL Journal Volume 3 Number 1 (2018): 77–89 

 

 

 
The BC TEAL Journal is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 
Copyright rests with the authors. 

 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

