Contrastive Study On The Lexical Richness Of Chinese English Major Students In Writing

Vocabulary works as the fundamental building materials of an article.To some extent,competence of lexical application is an evaluation criterion in writing that can indicate a learner’s English proficiency level.For this reason,lexical studies have always attracted the attention of linguists at home and abroad.However,lexical richness cannot be defined as a fixed formula,different linguistic scholars have their different opinions on it.According to the writing features of Chinese English major students,this thesis,based on the theoretical framework of Read(2000),will analyze lexical richness from four dimensions:lexical variation,lexical sophistication,lexical density and lexical error,combining with the writing features of Chinese English major students.This thesis adopts corpus-based contrastive analysis approach and chooses 40 articles written by Chinese English major students from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL),which are 20 articles from high grade students and 20 articles from low grade students.In addition,the study extracts the relevant data,adopting 40 articles written by native English college students from British National Corpus(BNC)and 40 articles written by Chinese non-English major students from WECCL as the comparative reference texts.The study aims to explore the features of Chinese English major students’ lexical richness and the causes of the problems in writing.The study questions are as follows:(1)With the grade growth,what are the Chinese English major students’development of lexical variation,lexical sophistication,lexical density and lexical error in writing?(2)Compared with the writing from Chinese non-English major students and native English speakers,what are the convergences and differences of Chinese English major students?(3)From the study,what are the advantages and limitations of Chinese English major students’ lexical richness in writing?The main corpus tools are AntConc 3.2.0,SPSS 22.0,Tree Tagger,RANGE 32 and its sub-corpus Frequency,and the formula Uber Index is also applied in this study.The comparison will be done from 3 aspects:First,the comparison between the high grade students and the low grade students;second,the comparison between Chinese English major students and Chinese non-English major students;third,the comparison between Chinese English major students and native English speakers.The results indicate that:(1)In the comparison of lexical variation between the high grade students and the low grade students,the Uber value of high grade group is 21.16 and that of the low grade students is 20.83.There is a slight difference between them.In the comparison of lexical sophistication,the ratio of the high grade students is 8.68%and that of the low grade students is 6.07%.The difference between them is small.In the comparison of lexical density,the ratio of the high grade students is 79.83%and that of the low grade students is 70.76%.There is a large disparity between them.In the comparison of lexical error,the number of errors of the high grade students is 26 and that of the low grade students is 32,which means without significant difference.(2)In the comparison between Chinese English major students and non-English major students,they have similar proportions in lexical sophistication,which are 87.43%and 90.16%.Except for that,they have a great disparity in the other three dimensions.In the comparison between Chinese English major students and native English speakers,they have a great disparity in lexical sophistication,and the proportions of them are 87.43%-6.44%-2.79%-4.59%and 72.34%-6.04%-5.89%-16.21%.Except for that,the difference is small in the other three dimensions.(3)According to the comparisons,in the performance of lexical density and lexical error,Chinese English major students are similar to native English speakers.In lexical variation,Chinese English major students develop slowly.In lexical sophistication,Chinese English major Students tend to overuse high frequency words while they avoid using academic or advanced words.This study is enlightening for second language teaching and self-assessment in lexical richness for the Chinese English major students and non-English major students.