| This corpus-based study investigated the developmental features of L2lexical performance in the writings by Chinese EFL learners during the three-year high school through a quasi-longitudinal approach. By conceptualizing L2lexical performance along the two dimensions, namely the dimension of lexical richness, which is represented by lexical variation, lexical density and lexical sophistication, and the dimension of collocation, which is represented by lexical collocation, grammatical collocation and idiom, the study is aimed at exploring the developmental features from two major perspectives:(1) developmental features of lexical performance in the L2writings by Chinese high school students (2) the relationship between L2lexical performance and the overall L2writing performance.The data of this study comes from240timed compositions on the same topic written by240students from Grade One to National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) Candidates in two high schools in one province. All the writings are inputted into the computer, processed, tagged and merged to form raw corpus and tagged corpus for further analysis. In the treatment of corpus data, a number of vocabulary statistical tools such as WordSmith5.0Tools and Range32are used for the measurement of each lexical variable, In addition, for the calculation of collocation variables, apart from a series of collocation dictionaries, MI scores and T-scores by WordSmith5.0as well as the British National Corpus are consulted. SPSS22.0is employed to handle the statistical analyses of the data.The major findings are:1) Chinese high school students’ L2lexical performance in writing show noticeable progress with the increase of grade level, but the development is not in a linear pattern;2) the students’acquisition patterns and developmental paths of the multi-dimensions of L2lexical performance in writing are convergent but with salient differences;3) on the dimension of lexical richness, solid though not straight-line progress and a plateau phenomenon are identified in the students’ lexical variation during their three-year English learning; improvement is also found in lexical density, although no significant difference is observed between year-on-year changes; as for lexical sophistication, students make significant improvement in the first year from Grade One to Grade Two but no significant difference is observed in the later years;4) on the dimension of collocation, students procure great progress in the use of lexical collocations and grammatical collocations at the last stage of high school from Grade Three to NCEE Candidates while the progress in the use of idioms is the most prominent at the initial stage from Grade One to Grade Two;5) in terms of the relationship between L2lexical performance and the overall writing performance, this study finds that the multi lexical variables display varied developmental features at different writing proficiency levels, indicating heterogeneous influences on the overall English writing performance;6) on the dimension of lexical richness, lexical variation and lexical sophistication make good discriminators of different writing proficiency levels while lexical density is found to have little impact on the overall writing performance;7) on the dimension of collocation, no significant difference is found in the use of lexical collocations either in quality or in quantity at different proficiency levels whereas significant differences are present in grammatical collocations and idioms;8) the high school students’ writing proficiency does not improve linearly with the increase of grade level, with an evident drop-off in the students’overall writing performance during the second year of high school.It is concluded that these findings would provide some pedagogical implications_for the purpose of facilitating the vocabulary teaching in L2writing. It is also hoped that the findings of this study would shed some light on future vocabulary and writing research and instruction of high school EFL learners in China. |
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