Multidisciplinary Productive Academic Vocabulary List

The Multidisciplinary Productive Academic Vocabulary List (MPAV) is a subset of the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014). 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.

The MPAV addresses this by identifying a small core of 427 words from the AVL that are 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.