Investigating the Significance of Coxhead’s Academic Word List for Self-Access Learners

Abstract

The present study explored Thai EFL university students’ perceived benefits of self-learning Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) on their academic communicative skills and whether or not it should be incorporated into academic textbooks. The study employed a mixed-method design. A survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The result revealed that the majority of the participants held positive attitudes toward learning Coxhead’s AWL on their own. They agreed that Coxhead’s AWL helped them to enhance their receptive and productive academic communicative skills. Participants also acknowledged that incorporating Coxhead’s AWL into the academic textbook might help EFL university learners in various ways, particularly to improve their academic reading, listening, writing, and speaking abilities. In conclusion, although this study provides no empirical evidence of how knowledge of AWL helps improve students’ academic communicative skills, the study provides some practical guidelines for self-access contexts, a theoretical basis on how AWL is viewed by EFL university students along with a new direction to future research. Keywords: Coxhead’s (2000) AWL, self-access learners, academic words, receptive and productive skills, Thai EFL