Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words

We show how teacher judgements can be used to assess the quality of vocabulary used by L2 learners of French

Investigating lexical diversity and lexical sophistication of productive vocabulary in the written discourse of Indonesian EFL learners

This paper reports the findings in investigating lexical diversity and lexical sophistication of productive vocabulary in the written discourse of Indonesian EFL learners. Thirty one students at high school level participated in this study; 15 students were from B1 level and 16 students were from B2 level according to Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Students’ written compositions were used as the main data for this study. The gauge was done based on the result of the calculation of lexical frequency profile (LFP). The result of the calculation showed that the lexical diversity index of students at higher level was greater than that of students at lower level. In addition, based on the calculation per LFP category, it was found that the two groups shared similar patterns of lexical diversity index in which most varied vocabulary used in their writings falls into the second most common 1000 wordlist, followed by vocabulary that belongs to “not in the lists” category and AWL, respectively. Subsequently, the first common 1000 words category became the least varied words used by the learners. In terms of lexical sophistication, it was found that the percentage of advanced vocabulary used by less proficient learners was slightly larger than the percentage of advanced vocabulary used by more proficient learners. However, there was no significant difference found between two groups of learners in terms of lexical diversity and lexical sophistication

A Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Usage in Writing

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in English learning, which has aroused researchers’ great attention in recent years. However, their focus is on vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to productive lexical ability. Writing is an important productive ability for EFL learners, and a myriad of writing researches show that inappropriate vocabulary use leads to inferior writing quality. Therefore, research on learners’ vocabulary proficiency, especially their vocabulary in English writing is quite profound. 66 subjects from a comprehensive university participating in this study, finished one composition for analyzing their vocabulary usage, i.e. lexical richness which includes lexical sophistication and lexical variation. All the data and writing papers were analyzed with RANGE and SPSS 17.0. The findings of the present study demonstrated that the subjects relied more on the first 1000 word level to express their meanings in productive tasks and the lexical sophistication and lexical variation are not high. Subjects with different writing ability have differences in vocabulary usage, but the two groups only have significant difference in lexical variation and not in lexical sophistication. The present study enriches the research on vocabulary acquisition in SLA and provides helpful implications for vocabulary teaching and learning to improve learners’ vocabulary productive ability

Lexical Richness in Scientific Journal Articles: A Comparison between ESL and EFL Writers

This study investigated lexical richness in research articles published by writers of ESL and EFL in the ASEAN countries. The question was whether there were any significant similarities and differences in terms of lexical richness in research articles between these two groups. The researchers employed three different lexical measures to find out the answer: (a) lexical density (how many content words were used), (b) lexical diversity (how wide-ranging words were used), and (c) lexical sophistication (how many advanced and unusual words were used). The primary data consisted of 40 research articles published by two ESL countries, namely Malaysia and the Philippines, and the other two EFL countries: Indonesia and Thailand and were taken from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE). The researchers analyzed the data by utilizing three measurement tools namely CLAWS Tagger, Moving-Average-Type-Token-Ratio (MATTR), and VocabProfiler, and compared the results between ESL and EFL using the Mann-Whitney U test. Interestingly, despite different total tokens in several aspects, the data analysis results indicated no significant difference between ESL and EFL writers in terms of lexical richness and how they employed vocabulary in their research articles. This study further discussed factors influencing the use of vocabulary by two groups and concluded with limitations of the study and future research directions

Relationships between lexical proficiency and L2 oral proficiency

Lexical proficiency is strongly correlated with L2 productive language ability (Crossley, Salsbury, & McNamara, 2011; Laufer & Nation, 1995). While many studies have investigated the relationship between lexical proficiency and L2 writing ability, not many studies have been conducted in terms of spoken language. Also, few studies have focused on how non-native English speakers with different L1 backgrounds differently or similarly develop lexical proficiency in L2 speaking. Based on this background, the present study is conducted with three purposes: 1) to compare the effectiveness of measures of lexical proficiency in terms of their ability to predict the quality of L2 spoken production, as determined by scores on the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) at Purdue University; 2) to compare the different lexical features among different levels of L2 oral proficiency; 3) to see whether different L1 backgrounds present different levels of development of lexical proficiency. ^ A quantitative research approach was selected in this study. Three hundred and three speech samples from the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT), representing four different L1 groups of Korean, Mandarin, Hindi, and English, were collected, and in order to measure lexical proficiency, the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) was employed. Statistical inferences were based on Spearman rank order correlation coefficients and descriptive statistics.^ Results showed that OEPT scores have strong or moderately strong correlations with some indices of lexical proficiency. Interestingly, however, different results were obtained when the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficients were rerun without Mandarin groups: the correlation coefficients increased for the variables with Types, TTR, D, K1 Type, K2 Type, AWL Type, and Off Type. Descriptive statistics suggested some reasons for the different results with and without the Mandarin group: basically, the Mandarin group created more lexical diversity and produced more words as compared to other sub groups than the Korean or Hindi groups did. Also, the Mandarin group created dissimilar trends in each LFP variable, unlike the Korean and Hindi groups. Also, descriptive statistics on the LFP indicate that L2 advanced speakers express their ideas employing frequent words as a rule rather than infrequent ones. This result indicates that when it comes to vocabulary learning for oral proficiency, frequent words should be a more important focus in L2 vocabulary learning than infrequent words. Each of these results is explored in detail in the Discussion section. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed as well

Exploring the Lexical Profile of Advanced L2 Writers: Longitudinal Data From The Russian Overseas Flagship Program

This study explores the lexical profile of essays written by 48 advanced learners of second language (L2) Russian who participated in the Russian Overseas Flagship, an intensive year-long study abroad program, designed to help students reach Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 proficiency in all skills. Using the lexical frequency profile (LFP) and P–Lex as measures of vocabulary sophistication, the study found that over the 9 months of the program, students significantly increased their usage of words from the lowest frequency bands. This adds to the findings of Hacking and Tschirner (2017) that knowledge of lexical items at the 3,000–5,000 frequency levels predicts reading proficiency at the ACTFL Advanced High-Superior level in Russian. However, the increase of vocabulary sophistication was not clearly correlated with improvements in the students\u27 writing proficiency scores, as measured on the ILR scale. A qualitative analysis of the students\u27 low frequency vocabulary usage reveals their control of native Russian vocabulary and derivational morphology. The analyses reveal the effects of writing tasks on student vocabulary usage

Vocabulary assessment in standard tasks

Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2010, Supervisor: Dr. Imma MiralpeixResearch on tasks carried out so far has usually neglected lexical aspects of learners’ production and it has normally dealt with English as a target language. Besides, only few studies present a native speakers’ baseline to compare the results obtained by the learners. The aim of this study is to analyse how two narrative tasks can influence lexical performance and how this performance can be assessed with intrinsic and extrinsic vocabulary measures. A total of 35 Italian native speakers and 2 groups of 35 Catalan/Spanish learners of Italian (intermediate vs. advanced levels) took part in the study by writing two different stories. Results show that the tasks with more elements elicit more vocabulary and more lexically diverse output than the task with less elements. Results also indicate that the two tasks used can discriminate across proficiency levels and shed light on research related to measurements issues