Asian Association for Language Assessment

In  the context of profiling spoken discourse features in academic settings  with three academic spoken corpora of three million words as the  database, it became clear that academic vocabulary plays an important  role in such discourse. Existing research in other contexts also  contends that vocabulary knowledge plays a significant role in listening  comprehension, providing further support for our argument that  knowledge of academic vocabulary facilitates academic communication and  academic vocabulary should form an important element in an English  proficiency test for academic purposes. Since the creation of the  University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984), a number of academic  vocabulary lists have appeared, including the Academic Word List (AWL,  Coxhead, 2000), Academic Formulaic List (AFL, Simpson-Vlach & Ellis,  2010), PHRASE List (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012), and Academic  Vocabulary List (AVL, Gardner & Davies, 2013). These lists were  created following different frameworks, and therefore differ in their  scopes of coverage. The present study aims to evaluate the usefulness of  two of these lists, namely, AVL and AFL, for detecting academicality,  i.e., density of academic vocabulary, in different generations of the  TOEFL, which is intended for determining candidates’ suitability for  academic studies in universities. In the present study, I first analyze  the approaches and criteria adopted in creating these vocabulary lists  and then apply the lists to profiling the academic lexical coverage of  the listening and reading sub-tests of multiple forms of TOEFL pBT and  TOEFL iBT. I will finally report my findings from these analyses.