Build your academic vocabulary

The academic word list is, unsurprisingly, a list of words which are common in academic texts and situations, and which are therefore useful to learn if you're planning to study at university or take the IELTS exam. You can find the list, as well as a detailed explanation of how it was produced at this website. Someone very intelligent at the University of Nottingham has created an incredibly useful tool which uses the list to identify academic words within any text. All you need to do is find some text online and copy and paste it into the box on this page (the AWL highlighter) and it will produce a new version of your test with all the academic words in bold. After reading, studying, and working out the meaning of these words, you can test yourself by making a gapped version of the same text with the AWL gap-maker. This works on exactly the same principle - all you need to do is past your text into the box and click on submit.

The highlighter and gap-maker will recognise academic words in ANY text that you paste, but it might be a good idea to search for articles in either The New Scientist or The Economist online editions. Articles you find in these magazines are typical of the types of text you have to read in an IELTS exam.