Averil Jean Coxhead (born 1966) is a New Zealand academic and a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in applied linguistics. She is known for creating the Academic Word List, which is a list of 570 English word families that appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. She has also created wordlists for other uses, such as rugby terms for referees and players, and building terms for Tongan tradespeople.
Academic career
Coxhead completed a PhD titled Using vocabulary from input texts in writing tasks at Victoria University of Wellington in 2008. Coxhead then joined the faculty of Victoria University, rising to Professor in 2022. As of 2026, Coxhead is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Coxhead is known for creating the Academic Word List, which is a list of 570 English word families that appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. Coxhead created the list when she noticed how much she relied on reading for her own foreign language learning, but had difficulty accessing appropriate texts. She had tried reading children's books but found they contained too many low-frequency words. She also saw how learners in a programme she taught in benefited from an approach called extensive reading.
Coxhead went on to create a list of words, such as 'ruck', 'loosie', 'maul', and phrases such 'swing it away' and 'clean out', that occur more often in rugby-related situations than ordinary English. The list is designed to be useful to anyone needing to learn the technical terms associated with rugby, but especially players, referees and coaches working internationally. With colleague Jean Parkinson, Coxhead has researched the language used in trades such as plumbing, building and automotive fabrication, and written bilingual books for Tongan tradespeople.
In 2026 Coxhead was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Selected works
Books
Journal articles
References
External links Sailing in another direction, Coxhead's inaugural professorial lecture, 30 June 2022 Interview with Karyn Hay on Radio New Zealand about language of trades, 9 May 2018