Identifying Opaque Items on the Academic Vocabulary List
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Abstract
Numerous word lists exist, such as the Academic Word List (AWL) and the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). However, while many of the words on these lists are understood relatively easily with the help of online dictionaries or translations, some words have multiple senses and grammatical aspects that are likely difficult for learners to readily understand. These items are termed “opaque”, as their meanings cannot be clearly determined. In this paper, I identify such problematic vocabulary items to provide a more focused list since the AVL includes over 3,000 items. The meanings of the target items were examined first with six online dictionaries: Cambridge, Collins, Longman, MacMillan, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford Dictionaries. The academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to select 100 random entries for a target item with entries up to the year 2022. The parameters applied were a mix of qualitative and quantitative, with relevant information (collectively called item affinities) such as collocations, lexical bundles, related words, senses, and colligations included. The first 600 AVL Core Academic words were sifted for opacity, resulting in a list of 103 items. These were high frequency words with approximately 75% possessing 1 or 2 syllables and 25% having 3 or 4 syllables. It is suggested that filtering for opacity can render a vocabulary list more manageable for teachers and learners.
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