Lexical Richness in EFL Students’ Narratives

The present paper compares different measures of lexical richness in narratives written by Czech EFL learners. The focus is on three groups of lexical richness measures: measures of lexical diversity (saying how many different words are used), lexical sophistication (saying how many advanced words are used) and lexical density (saying what is the proportion of content words in the text). The most frequently used measures representing each group were selected (Tweedie & Baayen 1998; McCarthy 2005; Daller et al. 2007; McCarthy & Jarvis 2010) and used to analyse students’ stories. The main focus of the study is on comparing the relationships between different measures, both within and between the three respective groups. The results show that the three groups are to some extent distinct and therefore measure different kinds of vocabulary knowledge but also that there are relationships between them: the strongest correlations are between measures of lexical diversity and sophistication; measures of lexical diversity and density correlate very weakly, and there are no significant correlations between measures of lexical density and sophistication.

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