Analysis Of Lexical Richness In Junior High School Students’ Writing

The analysis of vocabulary in writings is a significant component of second language writing research and there have been some fruitful research findings on this part during the past decades. It has been concluded that lexical richness (LR) is one of the important indicators in determining the quality of L2writing. Nation (1995) argues that a well-written composition makes effective use of vocabulary. Engber (1995) confirms that there is certain correlation between lexical diversity and the writing quality either including or excluding lexical errors. Besides, many other researches confirm the conclusion.During the past few decades, research on the use of vocabulary in L2writing has aroused the attention of more and more foreign language researchers. In China, however, research on the use of vocabulary in L2writing is few and far between. In addition, studies on the development of lexical richness in Chinese EFL learners seem to be fewer.Out of interest and curiosity, I conduct a three months’ study on the development of lexical richness in their writing by taking32students of Class1, Grade3in Di Xiongshan Junior High School as the subjects. Over the three months,270compositions in total have been collected. This research analyzes the development of lexical richness in the compositions of these junior high school students during the three months and the relationships of lexical richness to writing quality by means of the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. In my research, lexical richness is classified into four dimensions, i.e. lexical variation, lexical sophistication, lexical density and number of errors.In the final, the study indicates that as the students make progress in their English proficiency, lexical variation, lexical sophistication, lexical density and lexical errors are found to have certain correlation with the writing quality.Although the thesis has some limitations, it can give a few implications for vocabulary teaching and learning. Through my research, I also give some suggestions for further researches. These are the meanings of my research.