Why is the Academic Word List important?

You may have been told that learning more vocabulary from the Academic Word List is useful IELTS preparation, but do you know why it’s useful?

I asked myself the same question, did some research, and this is what I found out.

After analysing some IELTS Academic reading texts, I found that between 6% and 11% of the vocabulary are words on the Academic Word List; in an 800 word text, that’s up to 88 words.

And there’s no avoiding the Academic Word List for IELTS General Training candidates either; I checked a text from section 3 of a General Training reading test and found that over 7% of the vocabulary was on the list.

For a link to the Academic Word List and a suggestion about how you can learn more of these words, check out my previous post ‘The Academic Word List‘.

By the way, the words in this post on the Academic Word List are ‘academic’, ‘research’, ‘text’, ‘analyse’ and ‘section’.

Pete

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