Use of vocabulary is an important aspect of academic writing. Again, following Storch and Tapper (2009), we examined the occurrences of vocabulary in the Academic Word List (AWL) developed by Coxhead (2000). The AWL consists of 570 word families derived from a corpus of academic texts drawn from our ‘sub- corpora’ from arts, commerce, law, and science (see Coxhead, 2000 for details). These words are academic words that are found across disciplines and comprise 9-10% of an academic text (Storch & Tapper, 2009). Each student script was checked for the presence of words on the AWL and the number of occurrences.
