Academic vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes course

Academic vocabulary instruction can be beneficial to students in EMI universities since academic vocabulary knowledge predicts performance in academic tasks. With the aim to inform EAP materials design, this study examines the occurrence and repetition of high-frequency academic vocabulary in the printed teaching materials used in a presessional EAP course at a UK university. Findings indicate that even when EAP teachers do not design materials with the intention to include high-frequency AVL lemmas, as indicated from the interviews, they do include many. However, the average repetition rate of academic vocabulary was below 10 occurrences and, hence, unlikely to lead to incidental vocabulary learning. Implications for research and pedagogy are discussed.