The Academic Word List: 60 Useful Words for IELTS Reading

IELTS Academic Reading texts come from books, journals, magazines, newspapers and online resources, so recognising academic vocabulary is useful. The linguist Averil Coxhead analysed thousands of academic texts to create the list called the Academic Word List (AWL): it contains 570 word families that are rare in everyday speech but very common in academic texts. The 60 words below are useful examples of vocabulary you may meet in IELTS Academic Reading; no individual word is guaranteed to appear in every passage.

Not knowing these words directly costs marks, because IELTS questions paraphrase the words in the passage with synonyms: if the passage says significant, the question may say important or noticeable. In tasks such as True/False/Not Given, Matching Headings and Summary Completion, success depends precisely on this word base. Let's learn these 60 words in four themed groups — research, argument, change and society.

10 words a week may not sound like much, but if you keep it up all year that adds up to more than 500 new words. The method is simple:

1. Choose — on the first day of the week, pick 10 words from one themed table (for example, from the research group).
2. See — find each word in a real text: Band.az reading articles, BBC Future or National Geographic texts are ideal. When you see a word in context, your brain also remembers how it is used.
3. Write — copy the word, its meaning in your own language and the English sentence you took from the text into a three-column notebook.
4. Use — write each word in a sentence of your own: Scientists analysed the data... → I analysed my weekly expenses.
5. Review — go back to the old words after 1 day, 3 days and 7 days (spaced repetition). Flashcard apps on your phone automate this.

When you come across a word you don't know while reading, first try to guess its meaning from the context, then look in the dictionary — this guessing from context skill works in the exam too.

These 15 words are common in academic texts — they explain how research is carried out and what it discovers.

These words are used to express the author's opinion, to define concepts and to support claims. They are very important for understanding the author's position in a Matching Headings task.

IELTS passages often describe change: growth, decline, transformation. These words are especially important in paragraphs that describe change in academic texts.

This is the core vocabulary of texts about history, government and social topics. This group is useful for both Reading and Writing Task 2.

Memorising words is the first step; the gain in the exam lies in recognising paraphrase. In IELTS a question almost never repeats the words in the passage. So write down 2-3 synonyms for each AWL word as well:

• significant → important, noticeable, considerable
• decline → decrease, fall, drop
• establish → show, prove, determine
• policy → measure, plan, programme

Second piece of advice: learn word families together. If analyse appears in the passage, you must also recognise the forms analysis (noun) and analytical (adjective), because a different form may appear in the questions.

Homework: this week take any academic text, circle the AWL words and then compare them with the questions — you will see the synonym game with your own eyes. In the next step we will look at how to use these words in Writing Task 2.