http://dx.doi.org/10.18649/jkees

Analysis of Lexical Complexity
in Korean EFL Students’ Narrative Writing*

* The present study is a revised version of the author’s unpublished doctoral dissertation (Eunkyung Hwang, 2013).

Eunkyung Hwang

Professor, National Institute for International Education

Hwang, Eunkyung (2013). Analysis of lexical complexity in Korean EFL students’ narrative writing. Journal of the Korea English Education Society, 12(3), 161-180.

The present study investigates the degree of lexical complexity in Korean EFL college students’ narrative writing. ....Based on the overall findings of the study, lexical variation showed better significant group differences among lexical complexity across L2 proficiency levels, and in particular, CTTR and RTTR were the most reliable predictors to indicate the group difference in narrative writing...

[lexical complexity/lexical density/lexical sophistication/lexical variation/

어휘적 복잡성/어휘적 응집성/어휘적 정교성/어휘적 다양성]

I. INTRODUCTION

In the last three decades, linguistic complexity has been broadly explored in a wide variety of contexts as a critical indicator to measure language learners’ performance in areas of second language acquisition (SLA) studies...

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

1. The Definition of Lexical Complexity

Lexical complexity, as a part of complexity, is defined as the range and size of productive vocabulary (Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998). In exploring the levels of the lexical complexity of L2 writers, a main concern is not regarding how many words are present, but how various basic and sophisticated words or word types are available and can be assessed in written or spoken productions (MaCarthy & Javis, 2007; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998). There are three interrelated components of lexical complexity: lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation...

1) Lexical Density

Lexical density (LD) refers to the ratio of the number of lexical words (i.e., content words or open-class words) to the total number of words in a writing text (Lu, 2012; Malvern et al., 2004)...

2) Lexical Sophistication

Lexical sophistication (LS) refers to “the proportion of relatively unusual or advanced words in the learner’s text” (Read, 2000, p. 203). It is measured by determining which lexical words in a written sample are not on a list of basic ...

2. Previous Studies on Lexical Complexity

Some previous SLA studies have researched on the linguistic dimension, particularly regarding the lexical complexity, which consists of lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. Among the three sub-dimensions of it...

III. METHOD

1. Participants

The participants in the present study were 319 Korean female college students in Seoul, Korea. They were from 18 classes and consisted of 19 different majors...

2. Data Collection and Procedure

The data came from a web-based writing test during the period from May 1 to 14 of 2012, which was administered to the participants in a computer laboratory by a researcher. On each test date, instructors announced that the written test would not......

...Table 1 indicates the descriptive statistics of the participants’ writing test scores by e-rater® and their writing proficiency levels....

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics of the Participants’ Writing Scores and Proficiency Levels

Level	M	SD	SE	t	df	p
Scores	-3.671	4.419	.528	-6.951	69	.000

* p< .05

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

1. General Information of the Written Data

Table 3 shows the general information about the learner corpus analyzed by WordSmith 6.0. This program provides the number of tokens and types, and mean (M) and standard deviation (SD)...

2. Tendency of Lexical Complexity across L2 Writing Proficiency
Levels

Table 6 presents the mean score and standard deviation on each lexical complexity measure and indicates whether there are significant progressive trends...

....To gain a better understanding of Korean EFL learners’ detailed language development, parts of original writing excerpts from each writing proficiency level in writings are introduced in Appendix.

For the consideration of narrative writing, adjacent sentences that describe personal events are chosen, which the first sentence starts with the adverb ‘when’ and these sentences. In this case, the length of each excerpt was more than 50 words because of the minimum word limit of NDWERZ and STTR. Afterward, these excerpts were calculated for the lexical complexity using the L2 Lexical Complexity Analyzer.

3. Reliable Predictors of Lexical Complexity to Indicate L2
Development

To examine the degree of group difference in terms of lexical complexity in one view, level differences are displayed using z-scores, or standardized scores, across four proficiency levels. Specifically, converted z-scores clearly demonstrate some patterns of either the adjacent or nonadjacent groups by showing the distance  differences between groups.

As seen in Figure 1, lexical density (LD) and lexical sophistication (LS1, LS2) did not show any significant distance among groups....

Figure 1

z-scores of Lexical Complexity

On the other hand, NDW, TTR, CTTR, and RTTR presented clear distances among any two adjacent groups, and were considered as reliable predictors that...

V. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

These findings yield practical implications for L2 instructors in Korea to teach English courses. Korean EFL college students did not show any significant difference in using the range of vocabulary....

REFERENCES

Arnaud, P. J. L. (1992). Objective lexical and grammatical characteristics of L2 written compositions and the validity of separate-component tests. In P. J. L. Arnaud & H. Bejoint (Eds.), Vocabulary and applied linguistics (pp. 133-145). Macmillan.

Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic development study. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

APPENDIX A

Excerpt

Beginner: When I high school, there are fun friend. She like to play and she looks like not interest to study. She has pretty appearance, affirmative character, and many popularity...

APPENDIX B

Results of Lexical Complexity in Narrative Writing Samples

	LD	LS1	LS2	NDW	NDWERZ	TTR	STTR	CTTR	RTTR
1	0.38	0.13	0.18	44	37.80	0.73	0.74	4.02	5.68
2	0.32	0.09	0.20	50	38.70	0.72	0.74	4.26	6.02
3	0.33	0.22	0.26	58	41.20	0.81	0.82	4.83	6.84
4	0.39	0.28	0.24	54	40.20	0.73	0.74	4.44	6.28

Note.1=Beginner; 2=Intermediate; 3=High-intermediate; 4=Advanced

Applicable Levels: College

Eunkyung Hwang

Department of Foreign Language Education Support

National Institute for International Education (NIIED)

110-810, Ehwajang-gil 81, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea

Tel: (02) 0000-0000

Email: 00000000@moe.go.kr