A Comparative Study of EFL Learners’Lexical Richness in English Writing文献综述

 2021-11-04 20:59:17

毕业论文课题相关文献综述

1.Introduction

1.1 Research background

Vocabulary has always been an important cornerstone of English writing and works as the fundamental building materials of language, thus vocabulary knowledge is one of the essential parts of SLA (second language acquisition). As McCarthy stated that no matter how much the students learn grammar, no matter how successfully they master the pronunciation, without words to express a wider range of meanings, communication in a foreign language just cannot happen in any meaningful way (McCarthy, 2007). So vocabulary knowledge has aroused great attention of many scholars, teachers and students. Research on lexical richness has become increasingly popular among researchers and correspondingly has produced interesting findings. And under the background of new curriculum reform, the ability of language output has been an important part in second language teaching. In their research, Laufer and Nation (1995) hold that a well-written composition which aims to impress readers must make full use of vocabulary.

Lexical richness is an important criterion to detect the level of vocabulary development. Although lexical richness was considered as the number of words in one composition traditionally, it is a tough job to give a clear definition to lexical richness, and scholars still try to explain this term. It is a comparatively new and frontier field to evaluate the use of vocabulary in second language learners compositions because it can work as a prominent predictor of language learners general language proficiency. Researchers usually adopt indicators or measures to quantity words, they devise a measurement called Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) to deal with the portion of high frequency and academic words in writings. Laufer and Nation (1995) also introduce some methods to measures the lexical richness, mainly including lexical variance, lexical density, lexical sophistication and lexical originality, all of which can be referred to as the lexical richness（Laufer, 1991: 440-448）. Previous comparative studies on lexical richness at different stages of writing are not very rich and there are not many references available. In addition, at present, existing researches mainly focus on the overall development characteristics of lexical richness and its influence factors. In terms of research design, previous studies were only limited to investigate the trend of the changes of each measurement index of language complexity with the language level or other factors, without examining the overall changes of other indicators. Therefore, it is not easy for us to see the development trend of learners vocabulary richness.

1.2 Need of the study

This study makes a comparative analysis of the differences in the use of vocabulary of EFL learners at different levels. It is aimed to compare the trends of change in lexical variance and lexical sophistication between two groups of EFL learners, so that we can draw more representative conclusions and provide some enlightenment for second language teaching.

The thesis has both practical and academic implications. On the one hand, if the language level has a significant influence on variability of vocabulary and if the language level has a significant influence on lexical richness, it will be helpful to support the teaching of vocabulary in L2 writing classes. In this way, research could supply additional support for teachers to put high emphasis on vocabulary in the L2 writing classroom, which has practical significance for second language teaching. Then, the awareness of lexical richness in English teaching can be emphasized. On the other hand, lexical richness, combined with the corpus-based approach, should be introduced and popularized among teachers and learners. Nowadays, learners can have easy access to different corpora, which provides learners with a large quantity of authentic learning data. These materials can help students acquire the usages. To acquire lexical richness, teachers and learners can access their writing standards more clearly and specifically rather than marks.

1.3 Research purpose

This paper studies the differences in the richness of vocabulary use in the compositions of English learners of different levels. Specifically, this study is based on the theoretical framework Laufer Nation (1995), Engber (1995） and Read (2000), there are two important dimensions of lexical richness, that is, lexical variation and lexical sophistication. Throughout the recent years of English teaching, both teachers and students have paid less attention to vocabulary learning. In addition, teachers emphasis on English teaching design is biased. The purpose of this study is to clarify the differences of students vocabulary richness in different grades through powerful data analysis, so as to provide teachers and students with reasonable reference. This study mainly compares the change trend of lexical variation and lexical complexity between two groups of EFL learners. This study can shed light on Chinese English major students lexical level from two dimensions with specific data. It can provide insight into EFL learners development of productive vocabulary and EFL vocabulary teaching.

2. Literature review

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