No language teaching bears good results unless it’s based on some sort of insight into the discourse that is to be taught. Academic discourse is one of the many discourse types that has been identified by researchers (Biber & Conrad, 1999; Coxhead, 2000; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). Coxhead (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) was the first attempt to list the most frequent vocabulary that occur in English academic discourse. After all these advances there is this untrodden path in textbook evaluation that is the evaluation of ELT textbook for their coverage of AWL and other content words. The main purpose of this study was to see what AWL word families occur with high frequency in international ELT textbooks. To this end, three developed textbook corpora were analyzed using the AntWordProfiler program which is a vocabulary analysis program. Moreover, the study also bore result concerning the frequency of academic words occurrences in newspaper article as a potential authentic source of language input to learners. The findings rendered the coverage of AWL in each textbook series, also indicated that there is room for other supplementary material to promote AWL development. The paper also discusses conclusions and respective implications of the study.