A Comparative Study Of Lexical Richness Between Chinese And Japanese College Students' English Writing

Lexical richness is an important factor that influences writing quality in English writing performance.In some researches,it is said that lexical richness has the function to indicate proficiency level of English learners.The name of lexical richness is not fixed.Different scholars have different classification of lexical richness,so with the development of lexical studies,the definition of lexical richness changes a lot in the past years.In this study,lexical richness is analyzed from four dimensions: word frequency distribution,lexical variation,lexical sophistication and lexical density.In this study,the corpus-based contrastive analysis is employed.One hundred English writings of Chinese college students from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English(ICNALE),one hundred English writings of Japanese college students from ICNALE and one hundred English writings of English college students from ICNALE are collected as the research subjects.The study aims to investigate the features of lexical richness in Chinese English writings and Japanese English writings.The research questions in the study are stated as follows:(1)What is the overall picture of lexical richness both in Chinese college students' English writing and Japanese college students' English writing?(2)Compared with Japanese college students' English writing and English college students' English writing,what are the convergences and differences of Chinese college students' English writing?(3)What are the advantages and disadvantages of lexical richness in Chinese college students' English writing?The corpus used in this study is from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English(ICNALE).And the research tools used in the study are File Join,Compleat Lexical Tutor,Tree Tagger and Lexical Complexity Analyzer.There will be three comparisons in this study.They are 1)comparison between Chinese college students' English writing and English college students' writing 2)comparison between Japanese college students' English writing and English college students' writing 3)comparison between Chinese college students' English writing and Japanese college students' English writing.The results indicate that:(1)In word frequency distribution,Chinese college students account for 84.46% and 8.70% in K1 words and K2 words while Japanese college students account for 84.47% and 9.12% in K1 words and K2 words.And in the AWL part,Chinese college students account for 3.95% and Japanese college students account for 2.77%.In lexical density,Chinese college students have the ratio of 50% and Japanese college students have the ratio of 49%.In lexical sophistication,Chinese college students perform differently in five aspects.In the lexical sophistication-I(LS1),lexical sophistication-II(LS2),verb sophistication-I(VS1),Corrected VS1(CVS1)and Verb sophistication-II(VS2),Chinese college students have the data of 0.88,0.63,0.00,0.12 and 0.24 while Japanese college students have the data of 0.88,0.61,0.00,0.13 and0.25.Lastly,in the lexical variation,the NDW of Chinese college students are 3205 and the NDW of Japanese college students are 2789.As for the TTR,LV and NV,they have same level.(2)Chinese college students haven't reached the standard level of English college students in the word frequency distribution,they still need to enlarge word accumulation in their daily learning,especially low-frequency words and academic words.The proportion of advanced words for Chinese college students is lower than English college students which may cause low proficiency in English writing.However,Chinese college students have reached the standard level of English college students in some aspect of lexical variation.Furthermore,the difference between Chinese college students and English college students is so small.(3)The results discussed above can give some advice for lexical teaching and learning in our country.Language teaching and learning should give more attention to the lexical richness and its dimensions.Furthermore,the awareness of lexical richness in English writing should be emphasized in students' daily learning.Low-frequency words and academic words is necessary for Chinese college students to master which is beneficial for the quality of English writing.Teachers also should put their much attention on words teaching.They need to guide learners to understand the way to master the advanced words.