Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English is designed for learners studying, or preparing to study, academic subjects on English-medium university courses. It is the only learner’s dictionary to focus exclusively on academic English. The dictionary is informed by the 85-million-word Oxford Corpus of Academic English, which includes a broad range of texts from 26 different disciplines within the subject areas of humanities, social sciences, life sciences and physical sciences. The dictionary shows how general English words are used in different ways across academic subject areas. The dictionary gives in-depth treatment to the academic English that is used across the disciplines. It includes detailed and focused treatment of the words that EAP students really need to know well in order to bring their own academic writing up to the standards required by their course. The dictionary shows where meanings and usage are different in general and academic English, and words and phrases from particular subject areas are clearly marked. The dictionary includes over 22,000 words, phrases and meanings, all of them with an academic focus. Words that occur particularly frequently in an academic context are marked with an Academic Word List symbol. The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead of Victoria University of Wellington, by analysing academic texts taken from 28 different areas of study. It comprises 570 word families that cover roughly 10% of most written academic texts. Marking AWL words in the dictionary helps students to prioritize the words that they will need to learn in order to understand and produce English for academic purposes. 50,000 corpus-based examples show how words work in relevant academic contexts, helping students use words correctly and serving as models for the learners’ own writing. The examples throughout the dictionary are full sentences, all taken or adapted from genuine academic texts. The dictionary focuses particularly on academic writing, helping students learn the words and phrases used in different forms of academic writing, and how to use them in their own academic written work.