中日大学生英语写作中词汇复杂度对比分析

Lexical Richness of Chinese and Japanese College Students’ Writing: A Comparative Study

在英语写作中,词汇复杂度是影响写作水平的重要指标。近年来有不少学者对不同国家英语学习者写作中的词汇复杂度进行研究。本文以亚洲英语学习者国际语料库(ICNALE)为基础,使用多种分析工具,以英语本族语作文文本为参考,从词汇变异度、词汇密度、词汇复杂性三个方面对中日英语学习者英语作文与英语本族语写作文本进行对比分析。结果表明:中日两国作文词汇使用范围窄,80%以上集中在最常用的1000词范围内;中国英语学习者在词汇密度和词汇变化性两个指标上高于日本英语学习者,显示出了稍高的英语写作水平,但是日本英语学习者在动词复杂性指标上要高于中国,表明日本英语作文中动词的使用更为多样。

In English writing,lexical richness is an important indicator of writing proficiency.Recent years,there are many researchers conducting studies on lexical richness among different English learners.This paper uses several tools to compare Chinese English learners’writing and Japanese English learners’writing from three aspects:lexical variation,lexical density and lexical sophistication.The corpus is derived from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English(ICNALE).The finding shows that Chinese and Japanese English learners’writings have a narrow word use range,80%of words in the writing belongs to the most commonly used 1,000 words.Chinese English learners perform well than Japanese English learners in lexical variation and lexical density,indicating Chinese English learners have a higher level of English writing.But Japanese English learners perform well than Chinese English learners in verb lexical sophistication,which shows that Japanese learners have a more diverse verb usage.