A Study Of Lexical Richness In Chinese English Majors' L2 Writing

Nowadays,second language written output has been regarded as a necessary and fundamental skill.However,that is quite difficult for second language learners.In the past few decades,a great many linguists and educators have been researching the factors that influence second language writing proficiency.They have also explored some methods which are needed by L2 learners to improve their second language writing proficiency.However,most of these investigations are conducted from synchronic aspect,and longitudinal researches are rare.This study focuses on an important factor that influences second language writing output performance,and it is lexical richness.Lexical richness is an important part of vocabulary and also an essential indicator of language proficiency.Based on the theoretical framework put forward by Laufer&Nation(1995),Engber(1995)and Read(2000),this study aims to deal with the following three questions:(1)What is the overall picture of lexical richness in writings from different grades,and is there discrepancy between learners from different grades?(2)What is the relationship between lexical richness and writing quality,and what is the most important dimension influencing writing quality?(3)What is the overall developmental path of lexical richness in writings from different grades?The participants were 140 English majors who were selected from four classes,including freshman to senior students from Yangzhou University.They were required to write a composition on the same topic on www.pigai.org,and then there was a collection of 140 compositions.Considering that a composition that had about 300 words was more suitable for this study.120 valid compositions that included 30 from each grade were chosen at last.The text analysis involved exclusion of misspelling,lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging.The description of lexical richness,the evaluation of writing quality and the developmental changes of lexical richness were investigated by the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.In the process of data collection and analysis,various tools such as Antconc3.2.1,Range32 and SPSS 16.0 were used.Based on the data analysis,the research findings are summarized as follows:(1)There exists discrepancy in lexical richness from different grades.Considering that the English majors' curriculum arrangement and the plateau phenomenon,there is significant difference in lexical variation in adjacent and nonadjacent groups from grade one to grade four.However,the significant differences in lexical density and lexical sophistication mainly exist in a lower grade and a higher grade,which demonstrates that the acquisition of content words and sophisticated words is a progressive process.(2)Lexical variation,lexical density and lexical sophistication all have a positive and significant correlation with writing quality.Among them,lexical variation bears a stronger influence on writing quality than lexical density and lexical sophistication.(3)A steady increase in lexical variation is found through grade one to grade three,though there is a minor declining trend from grade three to grade four.Detailed analysis indicates that senior students make slow progress in lexical variation,which can infer that the vocabulary plateau phenomenon appears in grade four.Lexical density increases gradually on the whole across four years.The post hoc multiple comparisons of lexical density demonstrate that it has a significant difference between grade one and grade four.The result implicates that the accumulation and improvement of lexical density can not be a quick success and requires a long process.Lexical sophistication almost takes a linear increase through grade one to grade three followed by a sharp increase from grade three to grade four.These results show that with the improvement of students' English proficiency;they begin to make use of more sophisticated words.Thus Chinese English majors have a great potential in improving lexical sophistication in their writings.These findings may have some important pedagogical implications.At first,lexical richness can be considered as a crucial indicator of learners' writing quality and their language proficiency.Therefore L2 learners should be aware of the importance of vocabulary learning and accumulation;meanwhile,teachers should pay attention to developing vocabulary learning strategies.Next,the overall developmental paths of lexical richness can help further understand the route followed by Chinese English Majors in their argumentative writings.The results generated from data analysis may be extended to other genres of writing.At last,the present study empirically reveals some problems existing in L2 learners' choice of vocabulary in their writings.It is beneficial for instructors and learners to find out effective methods to improve writing teaching and writing quality.