Thank you so much for these useful resources. I just used the Lextutor, and it's amazing!

I was looking for something similar a while ago and couldn't find anything more up-to-date than what Jane Harland recommended. I did come across something similar to lextutor that is simpler though it may not have all the options lextutor offers: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm

Hope it would be of some use

Thanks for the resource, Nashwa. This gives great background information about AWL.

Look up the work of Prof Paul Nation   at Victoria University of Wellington  New Zealand where he has extensive Vocabulary lists on line and freely available

Thanks all for your help! I think I got useful information for my project. For the characteristics of academic grammar, someone suggested the following sources:

Douglas Biber

. : UNIVERSITY LANGUAGE: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SPOKEN

AND WRITTEN REGISTERS. John Benjamins, 2006.

Or

Representing Language Use in the University: Analysis of the

TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus

Author(s):

Biber et. al.

2004

Report Number:

RM-04-03, TOEFL-MS-25

Source:ETS Research Memorandum

It's not a direct answer to your question, but if you have not come across it before you might find this interesting: Manchester University's 'Academic Phrasebank', based on a corpus of student dissertations and scholarly articles:

http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

All the best.

Thanks, Roy. This sounds like a useful source. Someone else gave me this list of Academic phrases and formulas, FYI:

Nick Ellis and Rita Simpson-Vlach’s Academic Formulas List, see their 2010 article in Applied Linguistics, http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/4/487.abstract

- Mark Davies’ overview of academic vocabulary lists at http://www.academicvocabulary.info/, based on subsets of COCA

- Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List, http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/

- Ackermann and Chen’s Academic Collocations List, http://pearsonpte.com/research/academic-collocation-list/

- Martinez and Schmitt’s Phrasal Expressions List (although the focus is not just on academic English if I remember correctly), http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/3/299.abstract.

Thanks, Naoko, that's very useful.

I hope the following web links would assist you further.   These links contain some useful information about 'academic word lists'

Best wishes.

http://www.uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm

http://www.englishvocabularyexercises.com/AWL/index.htm

http://jbauman.com/gsl.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YrlbN87Wp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiUTWwdhMDg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3YDrHSmOuU