Developing Academic Word Lists for Swedish, Norwegian and Danish – a joint research project

This paper reports on a joint multi-disciplinary Nordic project aimed at developing three new academic lexical resources based on corpora consisting of texts from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish academic settings. An academic word list exists for English, but no such lists exist for the Nordic languages. Such a list would be an important resource for both L1 and L2 students in their first years of study, a period when many students struggle to cope with the demands of academia. Moreover, the word lists would be of use to students and teachers at the higher levels of secondary education. An inventory of academic words and phrases would also be a useful tool for researchers of academic language use and for test developers. The paper outlines the initial stages of work on an academic word list for Swedish. Three potential research approaches have been explored: the translation of the English list, extracting academic words from existing corpora, and the compilation of parallel academic corpora where an academic word list is extracted from these. The paper will discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the different approaches and the benefits of carrying out a joint project involving several languages. The question of entry selection and the information categories of the dictionary entries and the interplay between the entries in the dictionaries and the corpora will also be briefly addressed.