A Study On Written Lexical Complexity Of Advanced Level Chinese Learners

Lexical complexity is an indicator of language learners' proficiency.Relied on the theory of complex dynamic systems,the purpose of present research is to study the vocabulary complexity of written Chinese by advanced level CSL speakers with different mother-tongue text backgrounds,which mainly involves the surfaces and the deep layers.The paper mainly answers the following two questions:the first one is how CSL learners from different native languages use Chinese vocabulary in their compositions;the second is whether there are correlations among internal indicators of lexical complexity.In view of it,we select 70 students of three senior classes from two universities in Wuhan as study subjects,with Chinese cultural circle(mainly from Korea,Japan and Vietnam)and non-Chinese cultural circle(mainly from the United States and South America).Subsequently,we collect corpora from their compositions written in the class.Afterwards,54 valid corpora are collected.Based on the corpora of 11 Chinese native speakers,a total of 25046 characters are included,and 14615 words are entered into the statistical program.Referred to related vocabulary research in ESL,and combined with Chinese characteristics and CSL productive vocabulary research results,we design the framework for this study,a total of 6 indicators with 10 factors identified as the scope of the study.The test process is mainly quantitative analysis,supplemented with qualitative description.In the quantitative level,under the help of Corpus Online,the author has used the SPSS 23.0 in statistically analyzing the data to present complex performance of senior CSL learners' written words.In the qualitative level,the dissertation goes deep into the qualitative description and discussion of the statistical results,especially for systematic classification and analysis of all the errors that occurred in the written corpora of CSL speakers.According to the results of the study,advanced level of CSL learners are affected by the cultural background of their mother tongue,and there are some differences in measuring with six indexes of lexical complexity.The results reveal that there are significant differences in lexical sophistication and lexical difficulty while lexical variation is smaller.The errors of productive vocabulary are sophisticated and changeable.On the one hand,CSL learners' written error rate is higher than that of non-Chinese cultural learners,and vocabulary error rate is opposite;on the other hand,the mismatch between the two is slightly different.There are more lexical errors than pragmatic errors,and the dilemma of hollow words is still obvious.And compositions'errors of non-Chinese cultural circle learners are generally more than that of learners from Chinese cultural circle.Compared with native speakers,there is still room for improvement in vocabulary capacity of advanced level CSL learners.The study of relationships among six indicators of lexical complexity reveals that there exists interdependence between lexical variation and lexical sophistication.Complex dynamic relationships exist in lexical difficulty,lexical variation and lexical sophistication.The results of the study show that factors such as the number of word tokens,word types with their proportion,and errors of vocabulary play an important role in studying the lexical complexity of learners.The theory of complex dynamical systems can be used to provide more useful supplement for CSL written output researches.