Reading Comprehension and Academic Vocabulary: Exploring Relations of Item Features and Reading Proficiency

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English‐speaking middle school students ( N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students’ knowledge of target words across ability levels. Our results affirm the strong relation between vocabulary...