A Study On Lexical Richness Of Korean Students’ Chinese Narrative And Argumentative Essay Writing

Based on the Read vocabulary richness measurement framework,84 narrative and argumentative essays from the HSK Dynamic Corpus were selected as indicators of vocabulary diversity,complexity,and errors,and the study was conducted to describe the different performances of Korean students’ vocabulary richness in narrative and argumentative essays from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.The primary aim of the study was to understand the intra-and inter-group differences in the three measures of vocabulary richness in Korean students’ narrative and argumentative essay writing,and to illustrate the trends in students’ vocabulary richness as their second language proficiency in Chinese improved.Secondly,the interrelationship between lexical diversity,complexity and lexical errors in students’ second language writing in Chinese was investigated through the different performance of the three dimensions of lexical richness in the two genres.In addition,statistical analysis software was used to illustrate the predictive power of each dimension of Korean students’ vocabulary richness on their performance in composition and to develop valid data equations.Finally,based on the findings of the study,suggestions and training methods are proposed for teaching Korean students in the vocabulary aspects of Chinese writing.The main findings of the study include:(1)The lexical diversity of the two genres didn’t show significant differences;the lexical complexity of both genres increased with students’ Chinese proficiency,but the lexical complexity of argumentative essays was better than that of narrative essays for students of the same level;the lexical error rates of both genres showed differences between groups.(2)The lexical diversity and complexity of both genres were positively correlated,and the degree of interaction between lexical diversity and complexity was higher in Korean students’ essay writing.(3)Both lexical error rate and lexical complexity in both genres significantly predicted students’ writing performance.The two factors were more predictive of argumentative essays than of narrative essays.