Pick your course, major, and week to get your ten words from the New Academic Word List — then learn the skills that turn one word into many, and practise with your own list.
Your words will appear here once you choose a course, major, and week.
Ten cards on one sheet, with the definitions on the reverse. In your printer settings choose double-sided (two-sided / duplex), then cut along the dashed lines.
Most printers flip on the long edge. If your definitions come out behind the wrong words, print again with the other setting.
Copy the text below, then paste it into Quizlet’s importer. Quizlet will turn your ten words into a set of flashcards.
Six skills that multiply what you can do with a single word. Open any lesson, then head to Practice to try it on your own weekly list.
Choose a course, major, and week above to practise with your ten words.
Every word in this workbook is from the New Academic Word List (NAWL) — 957 words chosen by researchers because they appear again and again in university textbooks, lectures, and journal articles across every field. They are the words that do the heavy lifting in academic English but rarely show up in everyday conversation.
We left out 14 entries that are not full words on their own — prefixes such as
non- and sub- (you meet those in the Prefixes lesson instead) and
small words such as whoever and amongst — so 943 words remain.
What makes your list yours is the order. The same 943 words are re-sorted for your major, so the words that matter most in your field rise to the top and become your earliest weeks.
Each NAWL word was rated from 0 to 1 for each of the 25 majors,
where 1 means “very likely needed in that major’s coursework.” The ratings
come from sorting each word into a subject area (medical, statistics, linguistics, economics,
general academic, and so on), giving each area a score for every major, and then hand-adjusting
the roughly 170 words that cross fields — notation, for example, scores 1 for
both Mathematics and Music.
First key — relevance. Words scored 1 for your major come
before words scored 0.75, which come before 0.5, and so on.
Tie-breaker — frequency. Within a band of equal scores, the more common academic word
comes first. So for Accounting, obtain (very common) appears before
transaction (less common), even though both score 1.
How relevant is it to my field? decides the band; how common is it in academic English? decides the order inside the band.
Words 1–140 become Academic English 1 (ten a week for fourteen weeks);
words 141–280 become Academic English 2. Words past 280 are the low-relevance remainder for
that major and are never shown — for Accounting, that is words like chromosome.
obtain, aspect,
impact, valid — sit near the top of every major’s list.
Specialist vocabulary enters as soon as your field’s words start outranking the general ones.| Major | Words scored 1.0 | What fills the 280-word program |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting | 108 | All 108 top words, then the 172 most frequent 0.75 words |
| TESOL | 126 | All 126 top words, then the 154 most frequent 0.75 words |
| Biology & Science Ed. | 302 | The 1.0 band alone more than fills the program |