A Study Of The Developmental Patterns Of Lexical Richness In English Majors' Argumentative Writings

This study was undertaken to describe lexical richness in English majors'argumentative writings in terms of lexical density, lexical variation and lexical sophistication across four years. The theoretical framework in the study is based on interlanguage theory and output hypothesis. The ultimate objective is to uncover the developmental patterns of lexical richness in their writings so as to expand and enrich the research on EFL learners'lexical use.The data used in this study are selected from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL), from which the researcher chose and treated 80 argumentative compositions, according to their length, genre, topic and the learners' learning stages. The data analysis involves six steps:exclusion of misspelling; lemmatization; calculation of lexical density and lexical variation with Lu's online Lexical Complexity Analyzer; calculation of lexical sophistication with RANGE; comparison through One-way ANOVA to find out the differences across four years; and comparison through independent samples t-test to see the differences between two years.This study has yielded the following three major findings:Firstly, a gradual increase in lexical density was found in the first three years followed by a sharp increase in the last year. Statistically, there is no significant difference between the adjacent groups from Year 1 to Year 3, but Year 3 differs significantly from Year 4. The results suggest that the development of lexical density can not be achieved at one stroke and requires a long process. It may also follow that learners are more likely to use more lexical terms, along with the improvement of their English proficiency and their capability to organize their ideas and structure information.Secondly, a steady increase in lexical variation was noticed across four years. Within expectation, there is no significant difference in lexical variation between the adjacent groups from Year 1 through to Year 4, implicating that the plateau phenomenon does exist in foreign language learning, and more obviously felt in lexical acquisition. However, there are significant differences between the nonadjacent groups, that is, between Year 1 and Year 3 and between Year 1 and Year 4. The possible explanation for the differences may go to the common understanding that the passage of their learning years may positively influence the accumulation of learners'vocabulary in the long run, though they may make slow progress in lexical variation, and such accumulation may in turn promote to some extent the increase in lexical variation. Presumably, the students at their higher learning stage are more likely to have lexical resources at their own disposal in their production to vary their diction or simply avoid the simple repetition.Thirdly, there is a sharp increase in lexical sophistication from Year 1 to Year 2 followed by a steady increase from Year 2 to Year 4. Interestingly, there is a significant difference between Year 1 and Year 2. Detailed analysis indicates that sophomores tend to use two types of Not-in-the-Lists words more:compound words and subject-related or education-related words. From Year 2 students to Year 4 students, there is no significant difference, though their lexical sophistication increases to a limited extent. It could be naturally understood that learners'use of more sophisticated words would be positively correlated to the promotion of their linguistic proficiency.The findings yielded from the study may have some pedagogical implications. In the first place, the lexical richness can be considered as one of the crucial indications to either learners' writing quality or their proficiency. In the second, the developmental patterns generated from the data analysis may help understand the route followed by Chinese EFL learners in their argumentative writings, and the patterns may thereupon be extended to other genres of writing. Finally, the findings may help both instructors and learners focus on the right inlet to the improvement of both writing learning and instruction.