An Empirical Investigation On Lexical Diversity Of Chinese English Majors' Tem Writings

Lexical diversity (LD) measures the range of vocabulary deployed by a speaker or writer and has attracted the attention of second language researchers in recent years. As Nation (1995) points out, a well-written composition, among other things, makes effective use of vocabulary. And Engber(1995) concludes that there is certain correlations between lexical diversity and the writing quality including or excluding lexical errors.This study investigates the developmental trend of lexical diversity in Chinese undergraduate English majors'writings from three perspectives, lexical variation, lexical sophistication and lexical errors. The sample is consisted of 200 writings from TEM4 in 2003 and TEM8 in 2005, involving 100 English majors from Shanghai University of Science and Technology (SUST), Fudan University (FDU), Shanghai Normal University (SNU), and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). All the compositions are coded, tagged and counted for selected measures of lexical diversity using the tools of Concordance in Wordsmith and online VocabProfile. At last, statistical analyses are carried out with the help of SPSS 13.0.The findings show that as learners further their language study, general progress is detected in both lexical variation and lexical sophistication. As for lexical error, both error types and error tokens are on the increase. Among all the major errors, article error is the most frequent one and improvement is found in verb employment.Among all the four groups, the lexical diversity in TEM4 writings of FDU is the best, whereas the lexical diversity in TEM8 writings of FDU suffers some regression, especially in lexical variation. To some extent, however, the other three universities progress along the time in lexical variation.Based on the analyses of these results, various interpretations 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.