Investigation of the Representativeness and Distribution of AWL in Academic Texts of Sociology

The discussion about whether Coxhead s Academic Word List is representative of other disciplines has always been questionable. Some research regarding this issue has been done during the pastyears but no research was conducted on the specific field of sociology. In this study the amount ofcoverage between AWL & SAWL was investigated and differences were reported too. To this end a corpus study was conducted using the software Wordsmith (5.0) to obtain the words which werecommon in both lists. In order to find out the differences, the words which matched AWL weredivided into 10 sub-lists and then these sub-lists were compared with the ten sub-lists provided by Coxhead. The results suggest that while there are 564 words which are common in both AWL and SAWL, there are some differences in terms of rankings and existence of some words in sub-lists

Keywords:

Coxheads Academic Word List , Sociology Academic Word List , Coverage , Sub-list