To what extent is the Academic Vocabulary List relevant to university student writing
By Philip Durrant. 2016
109 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in successful university study writing. Overall, levels of use of AVL items are high, and increase as students progress through the years of undergraduate and taught postgraduate study, suggesting that it may be a useful resource. However, significant variation is found across text types and disciplines. While the former is relatively minor, the latter is extensive, suggesting the list is more relevant to some student writers than others. An analysis by items indicates that around half of the words on the list are used very little. Moreover, the items which are frequent differ across disciplines. However, a small core of 427 items was found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines. This suggests that a generic productive academic vocabulary does exist, but that it is smaller in scope than the full Academic Vocabulary List.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed1a699d63abe8e5d7a8da5bb4c6ab0202c9a9f5
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects (2018, background): “After all, the research discussed in the previous section shows words in the AWL and AVL, even though they might constitute a general academic vocabulary, are also statistically associated with specific disciplines, and there is pedagogical value in such information (Durrant, 2016).”