Academic Word List: Coverage Range in Local/Global Textbooks and Exploring Effective Ways of Teaching and Testing of AW

Coxhead’s (2000) AcademicWord List (AWL), consists of 570 word ‘families’, each including a headword (stem noun or verb forms) and other family members. This paper highlights the pedagogical value of the AWL, specifically applied in setting vocabulary goals for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP). What led the researchers to conduct this study was an aim to profile the presence of the AWL items in local (General English for Science and Engineering Students, 2010) and global (Active 4, 2008) EAP textbooks taught in Iran. The textbook corpus of these two books was analyzed using the concordance program which is a vocabulary analysis program. The chi-square value of 200.42 (P = .000 < .05) made it clear that a significant difference exists between the two books. The local textbook has used more words (Residual = 493.9) while the global book covered less AWL (Residual = -493.9). Our next purpose was to consider an aspect of this work that has been little researched: exploring some effective ways of teaching and testing of AWL in EAP textbooks to facilitate the pedagogical purposes. In conclusion, we found that the local book did much better than the global book in EFL context and we could come up with some suggestions on teaching and testing of AWL in textbooks. In addition, the results of this study would have important implications for textbook developers, material designers, EFL teachers and even EFL students to have a more cautious look at local books prepared in the context of their own country