A Correlation Research Between Lexical Richness And Senior High School Timed English Writing Quality

Vocabulary acquisition is very important in language learning.English teachers usually spend a lesson in vocabulary teaching in every unit,but they found it is not effective,especially in the English writing.The reason it is that teachers have no consciousness of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary in vocabulary teaching.In English writing,it needs more productive vocabulary than receptive vocabulary,because the productive vocabulary determines the writing quality to some extent.From the 1990 s,researchers began to focus on the productive vocabulary in writing.Most of them take the college students as research subjects,but there are a few papers and articles about senior high school students.Under the theory of input hypothesis and output hypothesis,this paper researched the lexical richness of Grade 11 students' timed English writing.Two questions are put forward as follows:1.What is the change of lexical richness of the timed English writings ?2.Is there any relationship between lexical richness and writing quality demonstrated in these writings?To answer the above questions,this research takes the Grade 11 students from No.3 Senior High School in Yining as subjects to collect their timed English writings and writing scores.The data collects 200 compositions in four months.In this research,the RANGE used to calculate the types and tokens in writings.And the descriptive analysis Paired-sample T test and correlation analysis of SPSS are used to analysis the collected data.The research indicates that with the language learning,the Grade 11 students tried to use synonym and hyponym to enrich the vocabulary in writing,so that to improve the lexical variation.As for the lexical sophistication,students still overuse the first 1000 most frequent words,but there is a decreasing of it and they attempt to use advanced vocabulary in their writings.In terms of lexical density,they use more content words to confirm more information.As for the lexical error,the Grade 11 students tend to make fewer and fewer mistakes.In general,the research shows that there is a steady increase in lexical variation,lexical sophistication and lexical density.And at the same time,students make fewer and fewer lexical errors.In terms of the relationship between lexical richness and writing quality,the lexical variation,lexical sophistication and lexical density have positive correlation with writing quality.The lexical error negatively correlated with writing quality.Although this study has some limitations,it gives some implications and suggestions for high school English vocabulary teaching and writing teaching,which are the teacher should pay attention to the all-round development of students' vocabulary knowledge in the vocabulary teaching,help students to increase the chance of vocabulary output and in the writing teaching and trains the student to get into the habit of accumulation.