The target readership is English as a second or foreign language students intending to enter English-medium higher education, and teachers of such students.
The AWL was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
The words included in the AWL were selected based on their range (breadth of academic areas covered), frequency, and dispersion (uniformity of frequency),[2] and were divided into ten sublists, each containing 1000 words in decreasing order of frequency.
Many words in the AWL are general vocabulary not restricted to an academic domain, such as the words area, approach, create, similar, and occur, found in Sublist One, and the AWL only accounts for a small percentage of the actual word occurrences in academic texts.
The Academic Vocabulary List, based on the Academic Word List, drawing from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), was developed by Gardner and Davies in 2013.