A Corpus-Based Analysis On Lexical Richness In Speaking Performances Of English Majors

Vocabulary,as the foundation of the language,plays an important role in language learning.Lexical richness,as an important indicator of vocabulary proficiency,has been widely concerned by researchers.Previous studies on lexical richness at home and abroad mainly focused on the learner’ written language,while there was little research on the lexical richness of speaking performance.It is probably because that it was difficult to collect,preserve and transcribe spoken corpus.Regarding the researches on lexical richness of speaking performance,most researchers payed attention to the influence of task types or task complexity on oral proficiency.This study mainly focuses on the difference in lexical richness of speaking performance of English majors with different proficiency levels and on the relationship between lexical richness and oral proficiency.Based on the views of Read(2000)and Nation and Webb(2011)on lexical richness,this study proposed a new framework for the study of lexical richness of speaking performance,in which lexical density,lexical sophistication,lexical variation,lexical error and fluency were included.This study aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the differences in lexical richness of speaking performance among English majors with different proficiency levels?(2)What is the relationship between lexical richness and oral proficiency? The data used in present study was from the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 and 150 speaking performances of TEM-8 Oral candidates in 2007 were selected.Then LCA,univariate ANOVA and Pearson correlation were used to analyze the samples and the data used in present study.The findings are shown below:(1)Regarding question one,the results showed that the excellent group and the good group were significantly higher than the pass group in terms of lexical variation,lexical error and fluency.In terms of lexical sophistication,the excellent group was significantly higher than the pass group,while the difference between other proficiency groups was not significant.There were no significant differences in lexical density,lexical sophistication,lexical variation,lexical error and fluency between the excellent group and the good group.(2)Regarding the question two,the results showed that lexical sophistication,lexical variation and the number of words spoken per minute were significantly positively correlated with oral proficiency,while lexical error,filled pause,unfilled pause and repair were significantly negatively correlated with oral proficiency.Specifically,the strongest correlation was found between lexical error and oral proficiency(r=-.703,p=.000<.01),while lexical sophistication showed the weakest correlation with oral proficiency(r=.223,p=.006<.01).The correlations between NDW(r=.480,p=.000<.01),words/minute(r=.488,p=.000<.01)and unfilled pause(r=-.638,p=.000<.01)were all moderately correlated with oral proficiency.CTTR(r=.330,p=.000<.01,filled pause(r=-.367,p=.000<.01)and repair(r=-.301,p=.000<.01)were all weakly correlated with oral proficiency,although significantly.Through empirical research,this study revealed the group differences in lexical richness of speaking performances of English majors and the relationship between lexical richness and oral proficiency.It is helpful for English teachers and English majors to find more effective vocabulary learning methods.