Averil Coxhead
Biographic Data
| ID | 1692585 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Averil Coxhead |
| GIVEN NAMES | Averil |
| FAMILY NAME | Coxhead |
| SIGNATURE | COXHEAD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Victoria University of Wellington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3392-6961 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 153 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Vocabulary and Language for Specific Purposes
Vocabulary is an essential element of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) where the communicative needs of learners in academic or professional fields are paramount. Being able to recognize this vocabulary when listening and reading is important, as is being able to use it accurately and fluently in speaking and writing. This entry focuses first on several key concepts about vocabulary for LSP, including its close relationship to the content of …
Special Purposes Vocabulary
We all might recognize words such as excited, triplet , and even quench perhaps in general English, but people who have studied Chemistry may know and use these words with specialized meaning. Special purposes vocabulary is, generally, the language that learners need for a particular purpose, such as preparing to study a particular field or subject in educational contexts including vocational purposes or learning while in a workplace situation or…
Evaluating vocabulary activities with Nation and Webb's (2011) Technique Feature Analysis: Insights from language textbooks, classroom observation and teachers' perspectives
Investigating the dynamics of English for Medical Purposes (EMP) textbook design and use in China
From entry to excellence: Exploring relationships between admission pathways, disciplinary areas of study, and EAL international undergraduate students’ academic success in New Zealand
This study aims to identify whether EAL international students’ academic success is related to their university entry pathways and disciplinary areas of study in an English-speaking context. Academic performance records, including Grade Point Average (GPA) scores and percentage of enrolled academic points achieved, of 511 English as an additional language (EAL) undergraduate students over a six-semester period of study were analysed at a universi…
Specialized multiword units in traditional Chinese medicine
Corpus Analysis of Vocabulary
Corpora and corpus tools are essential resources for modern vocabulary research. On one hand, corpora can provide researchers with a powerful evidence base for their analyses. On the other hand, corpus tools can facilitate efficient management and analysis of huge data sets and thereby greatly expand the scope and rigor of research. This means that corpora and corpus tools enable a previously unattainable level of scientific rigor in the study of…
Argument-based validation of Academic Collocation Tests
Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as key element and well established) in written contexts. A total of 343 tertiary students completed a background questi…
Technical vocabulary in government spoken communications: The team of five million in bubbles, PPE and CBACs
The New Zealand government delivered regular 1 p.m. televised COVID‐19 briefings from March 2020. These events had a crucial communicative function and were usually headed by top government and medical officials. This study focuses on technical vocabulary in a corpus made up of these briefings, including single words (grouped into technical word families) and acronyms (e.g., bubble and PPE ) as well as the most frequent two to five‐word multiword…
Contextual learning of L2 lexical and grammatical collocations with and without typographic enhancement
Multiple repetitions of collocations in second language (L2) reading produce gains in collocational knowledge. However, it is less clear how typographic enhancement affects the learning of different types of L2 collocations through reading. The present experiment investigated contextual learning of English lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations by Chinese speakers over two days. We manipulated the learning conditi…
Evaluating multiword unit word lists for academic purposes
Word lists play a critical role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, and recent developments include lists of academic collocations (e.g., vast majority, ultimate goal ). There is however still a gap in evaluating lists focusing on a similar group of lexis. This paper evaluates two lists of academic collocations by Ackermann and Chen (2013) and Lei and Liu (2018) using three different methods: applying an evaluation frame…
The development, evaluation and application of an aviation radiotelephony specialised technical vocabulary list
Helping learners develop autonomy in acquiring multiword expressions
Second language (L2) learners stand to gain substantially from mastering a wide range of multiword expressions (MWEs), and several studies have examined the benefits of language courses that regularly draw learners’ attention to MWEs. However, most of these studies focused on the learners’ retention of the MWEs included in the course materials and did not examine a potential broader and longer term effect. In the present study, upper‐intermediate…
Increasing use of multi-word expressions in conversation through a fluency workshop
This quasi-experimental study investigated the extent to which explicit classroom intervention helped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Japan to use multi-word expressions (MWEs) fluently in conversation. Over six weeks, an experimental group (n = 65) was encouraged to notice, practise, and produce 30 MWEs (e.g., I think I will, would you like to) through fluency workshop activities including shadowing, dictogloss and role-play. A c…
Technical single and multiword unit vocabulary in spoken rugby discourse
Relationships between lexical coverage, learner knowledge, and teacher perceptions of the usefulness of high‐frequency words
The Challenge Foreign language learners should learn the words that are most useful for them. Information from various sources (corpora, teachers, and learners) has been used to identify these words. One question that arises is to what extent these data sets correlate to one another. This study aims to address this question
Investigating vocabulary coverage and load in an Indonesian EFL textbook series
This article reports a corpus-based study of a series of Indonesian EFL textbooks for senior high school students from grades 10to 12 (16-18 years old), published by the Indonesian government. The textbooks were collected from the Indonesian bookkeeping information system and transferred into ready-to-analyse corpora using Range Programme (Heathley et al., 2002) to know the vocabulary load and what words are available for learning. The most signi…
Vocabulary in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Insights from corpora
This article reports on a corpus-based study of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) vocabulary. It first provides a vocabulary profile of English-medium Traditional Chinese Medicine textbooks and journal articles using Nation’s (2012) British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA 25,000) frequency word lists and supplementary word lists of proper nouns, abbreviations, and compounds. Then, it categorizes items outside Na…
Extracting multiword expressions from texts with the aid of online resources: A classroom experiment
This article reports on a classroom intervention where L2 learners were prompted to look for multiword expressions in texts. The participants were two intact classes of Vietnamese learners of English as a foreign language. Over a period of eight weeks, the experimental group ( n = 26) looked for expressions in texts, while the comparison group ( n = 28) used the same texts for content-related activities. In pairs, students in the experimental gro…
ESP in the Pacific Rim
Using Talanoa to develop bilingual word lists of technical vocabulary in the trades
It is important for anyone entering a profession to learn their profession’s specialised language. This is also true of those learning trades such as automotive technology or plumbing. Knowledge of specialised language allows trades professionals to speak to other professionals and read technical material. Although this technical language is new to all students, learning it is harder for students learning in a second language. In this article we …
How much vocabulary is needed to use a concordance
Vocabulary load is a predictor of comprehension and a common concern in relation to learner use of concordances; however, vocabulary load figures for whole texts have limited relevance to learner use of concordances. This paper explores the average vocabulary load of the citations (or lines) in a concordance, reflecting how learners use concordances as reading or reference resources. Non-parametric tests are used to compare the vocabulary loads o…
Vocabulary and Language for Specific Purposes
The study of vocabulary and language for specific purposes (LSP) includes vocabulary in areas such as English for academic purposes, occupational purposes, and professional purposes. This vocabulary is important because it is linked to learners' language learning needs, specialized knowledge, and goals. Research suggests that up to one word in three in a specialized text is technical. The first half of this entry examines recent research into voc…
Exploring EFL teachers’ English language proficiency: Lessons from Indonesia
This paper reports on a study looking at the reading and writing proficiency and vocabulary knowledge of Indonesian EFL teachers, the relationship between proficiency and years of service, and the teachers’ own perceptions of their proficiency in English. Three proficiency tests (Vocabulary Levels Test/VLT, Reading and Writing Tests), questionnaire, and interview were used to collect data. The results point to mixed levels of English language pro…
Replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences: A call for replication of Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006)
The focus of this paper is replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences, and in particular, a call for replication of two often cited studies: Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006). We begin by presenting a brief background to fluency and formulaic language, and pedagogical approaches to the development of these two aspects of learning in a second (L2) or foreign languag…
A New Academic Word List
This article describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list (Coxhead, 1998), which was compiled from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English, as described by West (1953). The AWL contains 570 word families that account for approximately 10.0% of the total words (tokens) in academic texts but…
The Academic Spoken Word List
The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English-medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list…
The Academic Word List 10 Years On: Research and Teaching Implications
The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching
Longitudinal Vocabulary Development in an EMI International School Context: Learners and Texts in EAL , Maths, and Science
This article focuses on vocabulary in the context of English‐medium instruction at an international high school in Germany. Longitudinal testing was carried out using the Vocabulary Levels Test ( VLT ) (Nation, ; Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, ), with 468 participants tested on entry to their first year of secondary school (Grade 6, aged 10–11 years old) and annually thereafter from 2009 to 2015. Learners with the lowest scores on the high frequenc…
Contextual learning of L2 lexical and grammatical collocations with and without typographic enhancement
Multiple repetitions of collocations in second language (L2) reading produce gains in collocational knowledge. However, it is less clear how typographic enhancement affects the learning of different types of L2 collocations through reading. The present experiment investigated contextual learning of English lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations by Chinese speakers over two days. We manipulated the learning conditi…
Increasing use of multi-word expressions in conversation through a fluency workshop
This quasi-experimental study investigated the extent to which explicit classroom intervention helped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Japan to use multi-word expressions (MWEs) fluently in conversation. Over six weeks, an experimental group (n = 65) was encouraged to notice, practise, and produce 30 MWEs (e.g., I think I will, would you like to) through fluency workshop activities including shadowing, dictogloss and role-play. A c…
Replication research in pedagogical approaches to formulaic sequences: Jones & Haywood (2004) and Alali & Schmitt (2012)
Research into the formulaic nature of language has grown in size and scale in the last 20 years or more, much of it based in corpus studies and involving the identification and categorisation of formulas. Research suggests that there are benefits for second and foreign language learners recognising formulaic sequences when listening and reading, and using them in speaking and writing. Very few studies, however, actually focus on formulaic sequenc…
Reflecting on Coxhead (2000), “A New Academic Word List”
Vocabulary size research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's successor, Graeme Kennedy, also saw corpus linguistics as a very fruitful and important area of applied lan…
A New Academic Word List
This article describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list (Coxhead, 1998), which was compiled from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English, as described by West (1953). The AWL contains 570 word families that account for approximately 10.0% of the total words (tokens) in academic texts but…
The Academic Word List 10 Years On: Research and Teaching Implications
The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching
Special Purposes Vocabulary
An important distinction to guide vocabulary teaching is the division between high‐frequency and low‐frequency words (Nation, 2008).
Corpus Analysis of Written English for Academic Purposes
Corpus‐based research and English for academic purposes (EAP) have a close relationship. In his editorial for a special issue on EAP and corpora in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes Thompson (2007, p. 285) explains this connection: “Corpora, at one level, are sources of evidence about language use, and permit a wide range of analyses of how language is used in different registers, contexts, and by different users.” The term EAP covers …
Vocabulary and Language for Specific Purposes
Language for specific purposes (LSP) can be defined as “the teaching and research of language in relation to the communicative needs of speakers of a second language in facing a particular workplace, academic, or professional context” (Basturkmen & Elder, 2004, p. 672).
Vocabulary size research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's successor, Graeme Kennedy, also saw corpus linguistics as a very fruitful and important area of applied lan…
Reflecting on Coxhead (2000), “A New Academic Word List”
The Academic Spoken Word List
The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English-medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list…
Replication research in pedagogical approaches to formulaic sequences: Jones & Haywood (2004) and Alali & Schmitt (2012)
Research into the formulaic nature of language has grown in size and scale in the last 20 years or more, much of it based in corpus studies and involving the identification and categorisation of formulas. Research suggests that there are benefits for second and foreign language learners recognising formulaic sequences when listening and reading, and using them in speaking and writing. Very few studies, however, actually focus on formulaic sequenc…
Longitudinal Vocabulary Development in an EMI International School Context: Learners and Texts in EAL , Maths, and Science
This article focuses on vocabulary in the context of English‐medium instruction at an international high school in Germany. Longitudinal testing was carried out using the Vocabulary Levels Test ( VLT ) (Nation, ; Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, ), with 468 participants tested on entry to their first year of secondary school (Grade 6, aged 10–11 years old) and annually thereafter from 2009 to 2015. Learners with the lowest scores on the high frequenc…
Vocabulary and Language for Specific Purposes
The study of vocabulary and language for specific purposes (LSP) includes vocabulary in areas such as English for academic purposes, occupational purposes, and professional purposes. This vocabulary is important because it is linked to learners' language learning needs, specialized knowledge, and goals. Research suggests that up to one word in three in a specialized text is technical. The first half of this entry examines recent research into voc…
Exploring EFL teachers’ English language proficiency: Lessons from Indonesia
This paper reports on a study looking at the reading and writing proficiency and vocabulary knowledge of Indonesian EFL teachers, the relationship between proficiency and years of service, and the teachers’ own perceptions of their proficiency in English. Three proficiency tests (Vocabulary Levels Test/VLT, Reading and Writing Tests), questionnaire, and interview were used to collect data. The results point to mixed levels of English language pro…
Replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences: A call for replication of Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006)
The focus of this paper is replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences, and in particular, a call for replication of two often cited studies: Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006). We begin by presenting a brief background to fluency and formulaic language, and pedagogical approaches to the development of these two aspects of learning in a second (L2) or foreign languag…
Vocabulary in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Insights from corpora
This article reports on a corpus-based study of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) vocabulary. It first provides a vocabulary profile of English-medium Traditional Chinese Medicine textbooks and journal articles using Nation’s (2012) British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA 25,000) frequency word lists and supplementary word lists of proper nouns, abbreviations, and compounds. Then, it categorizes items outside Na…
Extracting multiword expressions from texts with the aid of online resources: A classroom experiment
This article reports on a classroom intervention where L2 learners were prompted to look for multiword expressions in texts. The participants were two intact classes of Vietnamese learners of English as a foreign language. Over a period of eight weeks, the experimental group ( n = 26) looked for expressions in texts, while the comparison group ( n = 28) used the same texts for content-related activities. In pairs, students in the experimental gro…
ESP in the Pacific Rim
Using Talanoa to develop bilingual word lists of technical vocabulary in the trades
It is important for anyone entering a profession to learn their profession’s specialised language. This is also true of those learning trades such as automotive technology or plumbing. Knowledge of specialised language allows trades professionals to speak to other professionals and read technical material. Although this technical language is new to all students, learning it is harder for students learning in a second language. In this article we …
How much vocabulary is needed to use a concordance
Vocabulary load is a predictor of comprehension and a common concern in relation to learner use of concordances; however, vocabulary load figures for whole texts have limited relevance to learner use of concordances. This paper explores the average vocabulary load of the citations (or lines) in a concordance, reflecting how learners use concordances as reading or reference resources. Non-parametric tests are used to compare the vocabulary loads o…
Investigating vocabulary coverage and load in an Indonesian EFL textbook series
This article reports a corpus-based study of a series of Indonesian EFL textbooks for senior high school students from grades 10to 12 (16-18 years old), published by the Indonesian government. The textbooks were collected from the Indonesian bookkeeping information system and transferred into ready-to-analyse corpora using Range Programme (Heathley et al., 2002) to know the vocabulary load and what words are available for learning. The most signi…
Technical single and multiword unit vocabulary in spoken rugby discourse
Relationships between lexical coverage, learner knowledge, and teacher perceptions of the usefulness of high‐frequency words
The Challenge Foreign language learners should learn the words that are most useful for them. Information from various sources (corpora, teachers, and learners) has been used to identify these words. One question that arises is to what extent these data sets correlate to one another. This study aims to address this question
Evaluating multiword unit word lists for academic purposes
Word lists play a critical role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, and recent developments include lists of academic collocations (e.g., vast majority, ultimate goal ). There is however still a gap in evaluating lists focusing on a similar group of lexis. This paper evaluates two lists of academic collocations by Ackermann and Chen (2013) and Lei and Liu (2018) using three different methods: applying an evaluation frame…
The development, evaluation and application of an aviation radiotelephony specialised technical vocabulary list
Helping learners develop autonomy in acquiring multiword expressions
Second language (L2) learners stand to gain substantially from mastering a wide range of multiword expressions (MWEs), and several studies have examined the benefits of language courses that regularly draw learners’ attention to MWEs. However, most of these studies focused on the learners’ retention of the MWEs included in the course materials and did not examine a potential broader and longer term effect. In the present study, upper‐intermediate…
Increasing use of multi-word expressions in conversation through a fluency workshop
This quasi-experimental study investigated the extent to which explicit classroom intervention helped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Japan to use multi-word expressions (MWEs) fluently in conversation. Over six weeks, an experimental group (n = 65) was encouraged to notice, practise, and produce 30 MWEs (e.g., I think I will, would you like to) through fluency workshop activities including shadowing, dictogloss and role-play. A c…
Linguistics (30 works) · Second Language Acquisition and Learning (29 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Vocabulary (20 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (19 works) · Mathematics education (18 works) · Natural language processing (15 works) · Lexicography and Language Studies (14 works) · Philosophy (11 works)