Averil Coxhead

Averil Coxhead is a New Zealand applied linguist specializing in vocabulary studies, particularly in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). She is best known for creating the Academic Word List (AWL), a widely used resource for identifying and teaching academic vocabulary. The AWL consists of 570 word families that occur frequently across a wide range of academic texts but are not typically found in general English word lists. Coxhead developed the AWL by analyzing a corpus of academic texts and identifying the most frequent and useful words for students studying in English-medium academic environments. Her work has had a significant impact on language teaching and learning, particularly in the fields of EAP, English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Beyond the AWL, Coxhead has researched and written extensively on vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, and the application of vocabulary research to language pedagogy. She is a professor at Victoria University of Wellington.