A Study On Lexical Richness And Text Readability Of Medical Journal Articles By Chinese And Native Scholars

Text readability is considered to be a significant indicator greatly affecting text understanding,acceptance and transmission,while lexical richness is a three-dimensional construct covering lexical sophistication,lexical diversity and lexical density.The development of corpus technology has promoted the quantification and research on text readability and lexical richness.However,the relationship between the two,and the influence of genre and author identity on them still remain to be clarified.This study aims to clarify the relationship between lexical richness and text readability by comparing text readability and lexical richness differences between Chinese and English native scholars in writing each section of journal articles.Ultimately,we intend to provide reference for Chinese scholars and teachers in academic writing and vocabulary teaching.Therefore,we select respectively 200 research articles in The Lancet and The Chinese Medical Journal as Native and Chinese Scholar Corpus of Medical Journal Articles(each including four sub-corpora of introduction,methods,results and discussion).Measurement tools including Lexical Frequency Profile,Wordsmith 4.0,Free CLAWs and Libro are employed respectively to calculate lexical sophistication,lexical diversity,lexical density and text readability.Subsequently,We compared the differences between Chinese and English native scholars.Besides,we conducted two factor analysis of variance and correlation analysis to explain the influence of lexical richness on text readability in different sections.In addition,multiple regression analysis was conducted to clarify the predictive power of lexical richness on text readability through regression equation.The results show that(1)In terms of lexical richness,English native scholars have better performance than Chinese scholars,the latter undergo interlanguage fossilization.In addition,section factor has a significant impact on lexical diversity and lexical sophistication.However,section factor has no significant effect on lexical density,which confirms the conclusion that lexical density may fail to reflect learners’ vocabulary ability.(2)There are significant differences in introduction* methods,introduction* results,introduction* discussion,results* methods and results* discussion,in which introduction and result sections are more readable than methods and discussion sections.Besides,the readability of Chinese scholars’ articles is higher than that of English native scholars.(3)And lexical richness can predict text readability to some extent.To be specific,lexical diversity proves to be the strongest predictor of text readability in three dimensions of lexical richness.For Chinese scholars,as a matter of fact,all three dimensions of lexical richness affect the readability of texts.For English native scholars,both lexical diversity and lexical density have significant effects on text readability.What is more,there are significant differences in lexical diversity in every section of the articles.Therefore,Chinese scholars are encouraged to employ larger numbers of academic words in academic wordlist,regulate text readability so as to strengthen academic depth.Meanwhile,accumulating equivalent expressions to increase lexical diversity is of equal importance.In English writing teaching,teachers should highlight the semantic functions of each section and its matching lexical features accompanying tailored training.