Pronouncing the Academic Word List: Features of L2 Student Oral Presentations

This paper is an analysis of lexical choices, pronunciation errors, and discourse features found in a corpus of student presentation speech. The speakers were Swedish natives studying Technical English. Particular emphasis is given to the pronunciation of the words most often used in academic texts. 93% of words used in the corpus came from the most frequent 2570 lexemes of academic written English, 99% of all words were acceptably pronounced, disfluencies occurred at relatively stable inter-student rates, and 30% of all new sentences began with the conjunction ‘and’.