To what extent is the Academic Vocabulary List relevant to university student writing?

•Corpus-based evaluation of the relevance of the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) to university students' writing.•AVL items frequently used overall, with use increasing as students' level increases.•Some variation in use across text types; major variation in use across disciplines.•Around half of AVL items are very infrequent or non-occurring.•A small core of items found to be common across disciplines.

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.