Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 829

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 105 of the 105 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition

Open access
Nagy, William, Townsend, Dianna·2012·Reading Research Quarterly

Abstract

There is a growing awareness of the importance of academic vocabulary, and more generally, of academic language proficiency, for students’ success in school. There is also a growing body of research on the nature of the demands that academic language places on readers and writers, and on interventions to help students meet these demands. In this review, we discuss the role of academic vocabulary within academic language, examine recent research on instruction in academic vocabulary, considering both general academic words and discipline‐specific words, and offer our perspective on the current state of this research and recommendations on how to continue inquiry and to improve practice in this area. We use the metaphor of ‘words as tools’ to reflect our understanding that instruction in academic vocabulary must approach words as means for communicating and thinking about disciplinary content, and must therefore provide students with opportunities to use the instructed words for these purposes as they are learning them.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1002/rrq.011

Cites

105 of 105 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 105 references

Cited by

See all 829

Metadata

Authors
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D.
Venue
Reading Research Quarterly
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2012-01
Volume
47
Issue
1
Pages
91-108
ISSN
  • 0034-0553 (ISSN-L)
  • 1936-2722
OpenAlex
W2102866687
Cited by
829
References
105
FWCI
64.94
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/rrq.011
The paper
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.011

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.