A study of the frequency of academic vocabulary in a corpus of academic textbooks of the English Language Teaching

The current research is a corpus-based lexical study which aims to discover the presence of Coxhead’s (2000) academic word list (AWL) in a corpus of language teaching textbooks. The AWL, as the most well-known list of academic vocabulary available, is used to increase the knowledge of English vocabulary in students studying different disciplines across universities of the world. In the present study, after a series of steps, we developed a corpus of more than 11 million words, composed of language teaching textbooks. The corpus consists of 13 areas, which constitute almost equal number of words in the corpus. Then, using the Range software, the AWL coverage was analyzed across the corpus. The results reveal that the AWL items cover 11.13% of the entire corpus. This is higher than the figure obtained in similar studies conducted on many other disciplines. We also analyzed the AWL’s coverage in each sub-corpus, and found a significant difference among the coverage figures.