The Study Of Lexical Richness In Writings Of Chinese Non-English Majors

Lexical richness refers to the richness or diversity of vocabulary writers employ. Read thinks that high degree of lexical richness is one of the features of high quality writings. Engber (1995) also claimed the correlation between lexical richness, lexical accuracy and writing quality.This paper adopts Read's research method, and investigates the difference on lexical richness between different proficiency levels as well as the correlation between lexical richness and writing quality, with the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The sample is consisted of 80 writings in ST4 of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) sharing the same topic, with 40 high and 40 low quality. All the compositions are coded, tagged and counted for selected measures of lexical richness using the tools of Concordance in AntConc3.2.1w and RANGE. At last, statistical analyses are carried out with the help of SPSS 13.0.The findings show that there are significant differences between different proficiency levels on lexical variation,2nd 1,000 most frequent words,500 academic words and off-list words. Likewise, significant differences are found in lexical density and lexical errors.With respect of the extent to which lexical richness predicts writing quality, the four parameters predict 53.1% of the change of writing score in good group. However, in poor group, the four parameters even predict 70% of the change.Finally, various interpretations of these results are provided. Implications for teaching writing and vocabulary learning are discussed and limitations for the study are pointed out. Moreover, suggestions for further research are offered.