Exploring polysemy in the Academic Vocabulary List: A lexicographic approach

The Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) is a valuable resource for EAP teachers and students as it identifies potential lexical learning/teaching targets. This study enhances the AVL's pedagogical usefulness by identifying polysemous lemmas in it. Polysemous AVL are operationalised those with more than one definition two lexicographic resources, Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners' Dictionary WordNet. also examines theoretical issue, relationship between number of meaning senses their frequency an academic-English corpus. To this end, correlations were calculated numbers lemmas' definitions listed both resources COCA-Academic 34.38% 2673 included excluding homonyms, polysemous. Most (66.05%) come from most frequent 1000 lemmas. positively correlated. correlation non-linear, i.e., low-frequency words tend to be monosemous but beyond threshold, word increase increases. Implications future research teaching discussed.