A Study On The Correlation Between Lexical Richness And The Quality Of Senior High School Students’ Writings

Lexical richness refers to the vocabulary diversity or richness writers employ.Read(2000)believes high degree of lexical richness is one important feature that contributes to high quality writings.Engber(1995)also claimed certain correlation between lexical richness,writing quality and lexical accuracy.This paper employs Read’s research method to investigate the differences on lexical richness among senior high school students of different English proficiency levels,as well as the correlation between lexical richness and writing quality,with the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.The sample consists of 150 writings which are selected from the writings in the National Matriculation English Test for Fujian Province(2013).All the writings share the same topic.All the compositions are coded and counted for selected measures of lexical richness using the tools of Vocabprofile.At last,statistical analyses are carried out via SPSS 19.0The findings are as follows:As for lexical variation,there are significant differences between Level 4 and Level 2,Level 3 and Level 5.There are significant differences between Level 5 and Level 2,Level 3 and Level 4.With respect to lexical sophistication,there exist significant differences among different proficiency levels on the first 1,000 most frequent words.As to lexical density,there are significant differences between Level 4 and others.There are significant differences between Level 5 and others.Significant differences are also found in lexical error between Level 5 and others.There exist significant differences in lexical error among Level 1,Level 2 and Level 3.In respect of the correlation between lexical richness and writing quality,lexical variation is negatively correlated in Level 1;lexical variation is positively correlated in Level 2.There exists negative correlation between the first 1,000 most frequent words and writing quality and positive correlation between off-list words and writing quality in different levels.Lexical density is positively and significantly correlated in different levels except Level 4.Lexical error is negatively correlated in different levels but only Level 5 is significantly correlated.Finally,various interpretations of these results are provided.Implications for writing teaching,vocabulary teaching and vocabulary learning are discussed and limitations for the study are also pointed out.Besides,suggestions for further research are offered.