lexical diversity

The current study, setting a two-fold goal, attempted to see whether the preemptive focus on form (FonF) under either planned or unplanned conditions could contribute to increasing lexical diversity in written narratives and, second, to find whether there was a trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. To this end, 32 beginner learners were selected following a Quick Oxford Placement Test and assigned into two groups to receive preemptive FonF under no-planning and pre-task planning conditions. The analysis of the results through a set ofrepeated measure ANOVAs and independent-samples t-tests revealed that the first group with unplanned condition outperformed the one with pre-task planning in lexical diversity. The results also revealed the trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. That is, both lexical diversity and accuracy were significantly taken care of under unplanned preemptive condition whereas pre-task planning hindered attendingto lexical diversity and, thus, both aspects simultaneously. It was concluded that providing learners with appropriate conditions through form-focused instruction can set the ground for activating their linguistic knowledge and letting them attend to different linguistic aspects during writing.

The aim of this study was fourfold: (1) to investigate the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of Iranian Engineering students’ writing (2) to examine the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of their WhatsApp assisted writing (3) to determine whether their emotional intelligence (EI) increases through literature-based activities in a WhatsApp assisted setting and (4) to survey the effect of literature-based activities and the produced emotional intelligence on the complexity and lexical diversity of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing. In phase I, as students went through literature-based activities, no significant differences of accuracy were found; despite the fact that the mean difference and standard deviation scores were indicative of effective treatment, literature-based activities. In phase II, the results obtained from the analytic procedures of literature-based activities on the accuracy of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing showed that the experimental group showed higher accuracy of writing. In phase III, the result of emotional intelligence improvement was more remarkable in the WhatsApp assisted writing. Additionally, the WhatsApp assisted written productions were significantly more diverse in using lexis, t-units and clauses but not other parameters of complexity. The results have some implications for teachers and researchers in the ESP setting. 

The literature on second/foreign language (L2/FL) discourse is replete with corpus-based studies into the use of various features representing lexical proficiency. Nonetheless, the lexical construct of English for academic purposes (EAP) texts developed by postgraduates majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) still sounds like a relatively unexplored domain that merits further multi-dimensional investigation. To narrow the gap, the authors in the current study set out to evaluate the lexical richness of a corpus containing doctoral dissertations written by Iranian TEFL students in terms of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication. Taking advantage of the computational tool Coh-Metrix to analyze the lexical features, the corpus was analyzed in comparison with a first language (L1) baseline containing doctoral dissertations written by English native speakers. The comparative analysis of the L1 and L2 corpora revealed that the texts written by Iranian TEFL learners were lexically less diverse but more sophisticated. Additionally, the lexical density of the L2 corpus exceeded that of the L1 one in terms of nouns and adjectives. Based on the results drawn from a discriminant function analysis (DFA), the features representing lexical sophistication and density were found to be the best predictors of lexical richness since they could significantly discriminate between the two sub-corpora. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of evaluating and enhancing the lexical richness of FL/L2 written discourse.

EFL learners’ ability to use advanced and varied vocabulary is a crucial issue in writing performance. This study aimed to investigate the effect of writing task type on lexical diversity and sophistication. The relationship between lexical sophistication and lexical diversity in the narrative, argumentative, and descriptive task types written by upper-intermediate EFL learners was also explored. To this end, 70 EFL upper -intermediate learners, enrolled in advanced writing tasks, were selected as the participants. They undertook narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing tasks in a counterbalanced way. Then, Vocabulary Diversity (Voc-D) and Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) were used to measure lexical diversity. Lexical sophistication was measured using CELEX log frequency and Beyond 2000 Words (K3+). The writings were pasted into Coh-Metrix measure MTLD, Voc-D, and CELEX. VocabProfiler was also used to measure K3+ of the writings. In lieu of the purposes of the study, the research design involved repeated measures and correlation. Using Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient, the findings revealed that lexical diversity varied significantly across the three writing tasks. The highest scores of MTLD and Voc-D belonged to the narrative, argumentative, and descriptive writing tasks, respectively. Moreover, EFL learners used more advanced words in argumentative task type according to the measurement of CELEX and K3+ level words. However, learners' lexical sophistication in narrative and descriptive writings did not emerge as significantly different when measured by K3+. The significant positive relationship between lexical sophistication and lexical diversity was evident in all three task types.

Corrective feedback refers to a teacher or student’s reaction to a learner’s target language production containing an actual or perceived error. The last three decades have witnessed a large amount of research on the impacts of various types of corrective feedback on students’ written production. Along the same vein, the present study seeks to explore the effectiveness of providing teachers’ metalinguistic feedback vs. peers’ collaborative feedback on students’ writing performance. In so doing, the present study adopted a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design including three upper-intermediate groups (i.e., two experimental and one control). The participants of the study were a total of 62 English as a foreign language (EFL) freshman students from two public universities in Tehran, Iran. The writing tasks utilized in the present study were adopted from IELTS writing Task 2. The results of one-way between groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that students produced significantly more lexically diverse as well as grammatically accurate language as a result of both treatments. Moreover, it was observed that collaborative peer feedback led to significantly higher lexical diversity than those of other two groups. The findings of the present study suggest that L2 teachers can opt for a combination of corrective feedback strategies to help learners improve their writing performance.

Previous research has shown the differential effects of task-related prompts on syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity when L2 learners use writing prompts to produce a piece of writing. However, the extent to which the freedom in the selection of prompts affects these linguistic facets in L2 argumentative essays is still unknown. The present study, therefore, was designed to investigate differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity in argumentative essays. Seventy-one upper-intermediate male and female Iranian English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners from Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin and Safir Plus institute in Tehran participated in this study. Five-paragraph essays were used to collect data, and SPSS (version 25) was used to analyze the data. Results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed statistically significant differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity. Results from post-hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between lexical diversity and grammatical accuracy as well as lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, but no statistically significant differences were found between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity in argumentative essays.

Research article (RA) titles are one of the most important elements of a manuscript, influencing the reviewers’ decision and editors’ judgment, attracting the readers, and conveying the main idea of the article. Investigating 3197 RA titles published in 16 approved Iranian linguistic journals, this study aimed to map their pattern and portray their features of form and content. To this end, all the RA titles of the 16 Iranian journals publishing articles in applied linguistics up to 2022 (3197 titles) were collected. Then, they were analyzed for their length, presence of non-alphanumeric characters, syntactic structure, lexical diversity, as well as type and trend of information encoded.  Results show that RA titles in Iranian linguistic journals tend to be pretty long (average of 13.88) but mostly consist of non-repetitive words with high lexical diversity (.94). Authors mainly used colons (average of 82), hyphens (average of 79), and commas (average of 37) to form titles by nominal (average of 94) and compound (average of 82) grammatical structures. These titles mostly tended to embed information about the method, data, and results of the works and appeared to be highly informative. Interrelationships between features resulted in a checklist for RA title features that can be used by prospective researchers, academic writing instructors, and reviewers.

lexical diversity of argumentative and narrative writings of L2 learners, and the contribution of syntactic complexity and lexical diversity to the writing quality in the L2 argumentative and narrative writings of EFL learners. To this end, 46 pre-intermediate and intermediate Iranian EFL learners from four intact classes wrote one argumentative and one narrative essay in L2, and one argumentative and one narrative essay in L1 on different topics. Paired-samples t-tests revealed that lexical diversity surfaced more in the L1 writing of the learners. Multiple linear regressions indicated that among five measures of syntactic complexity, mean length of T-unit and clauses per T-unit better predict the quality of argumentative writing. In addition, complex nominals per clause are better predictors of narrative writing quality. Simple linear regressions showed that lexical diversity is a significant predictor of L2 writing in both genres. Based on the findings, writing instructors are advised to provide L2 learners with explicit instruction on the use of diverse vocabulary and different syntactic structures in order to help them improve the quality of their writing.