Lexical richness and readability of english degree student’s writing

This study aims to measure lexical richness and readability in the written production of thirty-nine pre-service teachers at Technical University of Cotopaxi in the November 2020 - March 2021 Academic Cycle. The research is descriptive with a mixed design of qualitative and quantitative approaches (QUAN/qual). The analysis follows a corpus linguistics methodology to clarify the relationship between the main variables. Lex-tutor Vocab profile and Coh-Metrix were employed to gauge lexical richness and readability. Lexical richness examination demonstrated that 83.59% of the corpus is composed of the 2000 most frequent words in English. In terms of readability, the corpus is very difficult to read. The correlational analysis revealed that lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical diversity explain in different proportions the variation in the readability of English degree students’ writing. After analyzing the linguistic features in the corpus, it was possible to identify lexical weaknesses to create a pedagogical booklet. This material suggests activities and learning strategies for enhancing the use of vocabulary in academic tasks. The proposal was validated by experts and users to ensure its feasibility for application. To conclude, pre-service English teachers require vocabulary instruction about less frequent and academic words to increment their written products’ quality. Lexical richness is only one element of the text that produces variations in readability. For this reason, the present study should be replicated in the future to analyze which other components might affect reading ease.

• Үндсэн зохиолч: Romero Mayorga, Nataly Monserrat (author)
• Формат: masterThesis
• Хэл сонгох: eng
• Хэвлэсэн: 2021
• Нөхцлүүд: LEXICAL RICHNESS; ACADEMIC WRITING; VOCABULARY LEARNING STRATEGIES; CORPUS ANALYSIS; LINGUISTICS
• Онлайн хандалт: http://repositorio.utc.edu.ec/handle/27000/8223