Free practice
By Will SalisburyUpdated
The top 400 words of the New Academic Word List, in 16 groups of 25. These are the words that are most useful in academic English, so they help most with IELTS Reading and Writing. Each group has a model voice for every word and example sentence, a place to record yourself and compare, a short gap quiz and a way to save your results to your account. The practice is free and you do not need to sign in to use it.
Who made it. The New Academic Word List (NAWL) was compiled by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips as part of the NGSL Project. The year in their own suggested citation is 2013. The version used on these pages is NAWL 1.2, which has 957 words.
What it is built from. The team built it from a collection of academic text collections (corpora) that already existed, and added material of their own. The academic corpus they describe holds 288 million words.
How the words were chosen. The NAWL is designed to work together with the NGSL, the same team's list of general, high-frequency English words, and it replaces Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List from 2000. The NGSL Project says that its lists are not made by counting alone: experienced teachers and corpus linguists look through the results by hand, adding words that learners clearly need and taking out words that do not belong.
How it is ordered. The authors publish the list with frequency rankings. We teach the 400 words with the best ranks, in rank order, in 16 groups of 25, so the earlier groups hold the words that matter most.
Why it matters for IELTS (our view). Academic Reading passages and Writing tasks use this kind of vocabulary: words such as aspect, impact and distribution come up in many subjects. Knowing them helps you read faster and write more exactly. A speaker who can say obtain, impact or aspect naturally also sounds more precise in Speaking Part 3. Many of the top words come from science and the study of language, so use the list as a map: learn to recognise all of them, and then choose the ones that fit the topics you write and talk about.
Sources. New Academic Word List 1.2, Browne, Culligan and Phillips (2013), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Frequency rankings from the NGSL Project's NAWL Learning Dictionary. Adapted: the words and their order are theirs; the meanings, examples and exercises are our own.
