The following word lists may be useful resources to teachers to ensure you have included common words in your students' language development. However, teachers are reminded that all vocabulary should be taught in context and only because it is needed by students to carry out specific language tasks.
500 most common words in English
This list is based on British English, American English and Australian English surveys of contemporary sources: newspapers, magazines, books, TV, radio and real-life conversations. You will notice there are a significant number of function words compared to content words. Any list such as this should be used only as a complement to the vocabulary students need to carry out specific, theme-based language tasks.
100 most common verbs in English
Because of their frequency, the verbs in this list are very useful to students and should be included where relevant in instruction.
General service list
The GSL was developed in 1953 and no revisions have been done in recent years. Consequently some of these words will seem archaic and are not necessary for students to acquire. Indeed, research in 2005 showed that the GSL contains a small number of archaic terms, such as shilling, while excluding words that have gained currency since the first half of the 20th Century, such as plastic, television, battery, OK, victim and drug.
The research also indicated that although the general service list is in need of minor revision, the headwords in the list still provide approximately 80 per cent text coverage in written English.
For use in the classroom, teachers will want to modify the lists and remove obsolete items.
Academic word list
The AWL is a list of words which appear with high frequency in English-language academic texts. The list was compiled by Averil Coxhead at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
The list contains 570 word families and is divided into 10 sublists. Sublist 1 consists of the 60 most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most frequently used words and so on. Each sublist contains 60 word families except for sublist 10, which contains 30.
The words selected for the AWL are words which occur frequently in a range of academic subjects, including the arts (including history, psychology, sociology, etc.), commerce (including economics, marketing, management, etc.), law and sciences (including biology, computer science, mathematics, etc.).
This means that the AWL is useful to all second-language learners who wish to study in an English-speaking institution no matter what their field of study. The AWL does not, however, include technical words which are specific to a given field. Nor does it contain words which are of general use and very high frequency.
