A student once complained to me, saying “The vocabulary exercises in advanced Daily News lessons don’t have many useful words! There are usually other words in the articles that are way more useful.”

To be fair, most vocabulary exercises cover both topic-related words and more general words. For example, here’s the vocabulary list in a Daily News article on military drills:

Drill (in the sense of “military drill”)
Exercise (in the sense of “military exercise”)
Tension
Invasion
Push
Threaten

Words like “(military) exercise,” “drill,” and “invasion,” are examples of words specific to the topic: the military. Most students don’t need to know how to use technical words like these.

On the other hand, words like “tension,” “push,” and “threaten” apply to a wider range of situations. These more general words are called “academic words,” and as you can see, we do feature them in our vocabulary section.

However, they are much less noticeable, so I don’t blame the student for not realizing this! So as tutors, one thing we can do to help students feel like they’re getting more out of the lessons is by highlighting these academic words.

But how do we spot academic words? And how should we point them out?

Academic Words: Hidden in Plain Sight

Academic words are advanced vocabulary that appear in a variety of fields (e.g. science, art, law, etc). Examples include:

Essential
Giant
Enhance
Efficient
Required
Emphasis

At first glance, these words seem very basic. However, they are quite difficult for learners. For example, a study found that non-native university students did not understand academic words when they encountered them in textbooks.

What makes these words so difficult?

Well, they’re hidden in plain sight. Technical words (e.g. “mitochondria,” “genes”) look different from everyday words, so learners pay attention to them. But academic words look familiar, so learners mistakenly assume they understand them.

And even when students look up an academic word, they face another problem. Whereas technical words represent concrete things (“invasion”) and often have direct translations into the learner’s native language, academic words tend to be more vague (“tension”).

So students will find it helpful when we point out academic vocabulary. Not to mention that focusing on academic words makes our job easier as well! After all, not everyone can come up with example sentences for the words “drill” and “exercise” off the top of our heads. Yet, we can all help students with the academic vocabulary with little to no extra work.

Now how do we decide which words are academic?

How to Tell the Difference

The definitions and example sentences usually reveal which words are topic-specific. For example, in the article on military drills, the definitions of “drill,” “exercise,” and “invasion,” include the words, “soldiers” and “army” and the example sentences are all military-related:

However, you’ll notice that the example sentence for “tension” is related to work. That’s a clear sign that it’ll be much more useful for learners.

You can also familiarize yourself with the Academic Word List (AWL), a list of 570 words chosen for frequency (how frequently they occur in academic texts) and range (how many different fields they are used in). Mastery over the words in the AWL, on top of the 2000 highest-frequency words, gives learners nearly 90% coverage of the words in academic texts.

But an easier way to apply the AWL to your teaching is to use the AWL Highlighter tool, which allows you to paste in a text and see which words are on the academic word list. For example, here is the Daily News article with academic words highlighted:

We then know which words we’ll want to focus on. We can point them out by:

Emphasizing how useful they are during the vocabulary exercise: “Tension is a very useful word. You’ll want to learn this if you don’t already know it.”
Making sure a student understood the word during or after reading the article: “Did you understand the word respond in this context?”
Using the words ourselves during discussions: “How do you think South Korea should respond?”
Encouraging students to use these words: “You said ‘bad relationship.’ You can use tension instead!”).

👋 That’s it for now!

In sum, academic words are more important than technical ones for advanced students. By focusing on academic words, our students will walk away from the lesson feeling satisfied that their newly acquired knowledge can be applied to future articles and discussions as well!