A Longitudinal Study On Developmental Features Of Lexical Richness In L2 Writing By English Majors

Vocabulary is the first thing to learn when anyone starts to learn a new language.Without vocabulary knowledge,nothing can be conveyed,no matter in written or spoken production.The research at home and abroad all indicates that writing,among the basic skills of L2 learning,is rather difficult for L2 learners.Research has shown that lack of vocabulary contributes to writing difficulty for some foreign language learners and that vocabulary is one of the most important features that determine writing quality.Though numerous studies have been carried out to find the developmental features of vocabulary,no comprehensive models of vocabulary development have been established.Besides,the literature review shows that few longitudinal studies have been conducted in this field,so the present research attempts to investigate the developmental features of lexical richness through a four-year longitudinal study.The research questions include three aspects:1.What is the developmental features of the four dimensions(lexical variation,lexical density,lexical sophistication,Lexical Frequency Profile)of lexical richness?2.Are there any differences in developmental features of students with different English language proficiency?3.What is the relationship between lexical richness and writing performance?To answer the questions,the author employed a corpus from National Curriculum Reform in English Major.The corpus consists of compositions written by 52 English majors at a university in Shanghai in four examinations during four years of college study.Various tools including Antword Profiler,and SPSS are used to process and analyze the corpus.After a thorough analysis of the data,the major findings are as follows:1.The developmental features of the four dimensions of lexical richness.1)In terms of lexical variation,English majors make great progress during the four-year study in university.While in the following two years,there is an obvious"plateau" phenomenon in terms of their lexical variation.2)As for lexical density,overall progress can be detected across the four years with non-significant decrease from Year One to Year Two.Since Year Two,lexical density shows a slow development without significant progress between adjacent years.It is in the Year Four when learners show significant progress in level of lexical density compared with the level of that in Year One.3)Lexical sophistication shows a continual upward development with different rates of progress between adjacent years.Learners make significant progress from Year One to Year Two,and from Year Three to Year Four.Between Year Two and Year Three,there is a stagnation period.This period seems to be a temporary phenomenon,which is followed by another phase of significant progress in lexical sophistication.4)Results show that Chinese English majors overuse the words in the first frequency level,although the percentage of it decreases significantly with more years of EFL learning.As for the second frequency level,learners also make significant progress across the four years.So combined with the results of lexical sophistication,it can be concluded that English majors tend to use less high-frequency level words and more low-frequency words with more years of EFL learning.2.The discrepancy and similarity in developmental features of students with different English language proficiency.1)Learners with low language proficiency is significantly inferior to average and high proficiency learners in terms of most dimensions of lexical richness except in lexical density.2)Although there's no significant difference between learners with high language proficiency and those with average language proficiency,the latter shows slower development with more fluctuation than the former across the four years.3.Relationship between lexical richness and writing performance.1)The study has found unbalanced relationship between dimensions of lexical richness and writing performance.2)Significant correlations are found between writing performance and lexical variation,lexical sophistication,and percentage of words in both frequency level one and level two.3)There's no significant correlation.between writing performance and lexical density.