An academic word list for Swedish - a support for language learners in higher education

The paper describes the ongoing development of compiling and introducing a Swedish academic word list (SAWL), inter alia intended to be used as a lexical resource in CALL-applications in relation to higher academic studies. When it comes to language acquisition, resources like these play an important part in instructed language learning. So far, no such resource exists for Swedish. The format of SAWL has been elaborated in collaboration with the Language Support Service at the University of Gothenburg. SAWL is compiled with methods from corpus linguistics inspired by research on English academic words (Coxhead 2002). Our work includes collection and syntactic annotation of learner corpora of Swedish academic texts from a wide range of university subjects within the Faculty of Arts. The corpora are freely accessible through Sprakbanken. SAWL are designed with university students and language learners with Swedish or other linguistic backgrounds in mind. The word list and the corpora can be used for studies of one’s own or in classroom situations, as well as forming a component of computer computerbased language assessment and CALLrelated application platforms.

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