Speaker
Description
As universities globally emphasize international academic publishing, producing quality academic writing has become imperative for EFL learners. Within this domain, lexical richness serves as a critical indicator of writing proficiency and scholarly credibility. This study adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate the lexical richness of English majors at the University of Danang, University of Foreign Language Studies (UD-UFLS), across three dimensions: lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. Using the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Ai & Lu, 2010), data was extracted from a corpus of 120 argumentative essays, produced during timed examinations by UD-UFLS students, and benchmarked against 120 native-speaker essays from the LOCNESS corpus. The quantitative findings reveal a notable paradox in the learners' linguistic performance. While students demonstrated significantly higher lexical density than native writers, this was primarily driven by heavy nominalization and a failure to use necessary function words to produce cohesive sentences. The analysis showcased significant deficits in vocabulary depth and breadth with English majors exhibiting substantially lower lexical sophistication, frequently depending on high-frequency vocabulary, and struggling to use diverse action verbs compared to their native counterparts. Additionally, their lexical variation declined markedly in longer texts, indicative of an inability to sustain diverse vocabulary usage. The study suggests that high lexical density alone is an unreliable measure of writing quality in EFL contexts, and academic writing curricula should shift focus from memorizing isolated low-frequency words to developing collocational competence, mastering action verbs, and balancing content words with cohesive functional language to achieve native-like academic discourse.
Biography
Nguyen Hoang Nhi is an undergraduate student majoring in English Language Teaching Education at The University of Danang, University of Foreign Language Studies. Her research interests focus on pedagogy development and second language acquisition.
Dr. Le Thi Giao Chi is a Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Danang (UD-UFLS). She holds an M.A. in English Language from Vietnam National University, Hanoi (1996), as well as an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and a Graduate Certificate in University Teaching from The University of Queensland (2003). She earned her doctoral degree from University of the West of England in 2014. She previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Language Education and has been actively involved in teacher training and professional development initiatives under the National Foreign Languages Project 2020, serving as a master trainer as well as a curriculum planner and developer. Her academic and professional expertise spans innovative English language teaching, English language and translation studies, translation and literary criticism, curriculum development and evaluation, and quality assurance and accreditation.
| Affiliate type | University |
|---|