The relationship between lexical richness and the higher levels of English proficiency
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概要
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In a previous article (Smith, 2001), the author investigated the relationship between the lexical richness of free writing and the holistic score ratings awarded to the free writing samples. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between the lexical richness of free writing and the English proficiency levels of the subjects who produced the free writing samples. The subject population and the lexical richness data are identical to those which appeared in the author's previous study. Both studies were designed to complement and extend Laufer and Nation's pioneering work (1995) in these fields of research, particularly with respect to the choice of subject population.Whereas Laufer and Nation's study assembled subject populations with low intermediate and intermediate levels of English proficiency, the author's two studies gathered subjects whose English proficiencies lie in the intermediate-advanced-native speaker ranges. The present study was designed to provide some complementary analysis of the relationship between English proficiency and the data yielded by the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), Laufer and Nation's tool for measuring lexical richness in free writing. Laufer and Nation argue in their 1995 article that, since it is widely assumed that a richer vocabulary knowledge is an inherent part of higher levels of general proficiency, one measure of the validity of the LFP is its ability to discriminate among writers of broadly different L2 English proficiency levels.Their analysis shows that the LFP discriminates clearly among three groups of L2 English writers at low intermediate to intermediate levels of general proficiency. This study investigates to what extent the LFP continues to discriminate among English proficiency levels within a subject population which has higher levels of proficiency than those reported in the Laufer and Nation article. The main finding of the study is that the LFP discriminates significantly between the low proficiency group and the high proficiency group, but does not discriminate significantly between the middle proficiency group and the high proficiency group. This suggests that, within the context of free writing, some qualifications need to be made to the assumed association between a richer vocabulary knowledge and higher levels of general proficiency.
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