Abstract
This brief study examines the vocabulary profiles of Asian EFL students’ written English in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE; Ishikawa). The ICNALE corpus is a collection of written and spoken texts from 2800 learners of English across 10 different Asian countries. The texts included in this corpus were composed under controlled conditions (content and length) and are grouped by CEFR level (A2, B1-1, B1-2, B2+). The corpus also includes samples of native-speaker English. In this study, vocabulary profiles were constructed for written essays from the corpus along three bands - GSL1, GSL2, and AWL - using AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2013). It was found that: 1) while there appeared to be a slight difference in AWL type percentages between low and high CEFR levels, these percentages varied much more greatly by country; 2) essays written by Japanese EFL learners had the lowest percentage of AWL types in the entire corpus while those written by ESL learners in Singapore had the highest; and 3) there was no statistical difference between the AWL type percentages of native speakers and those of CEFR levels B1-2, and B2+.
Author Information
Dax Thomas, Meiji Gakuin University, Japan
Paper Information
Conference: IICEHawaii2019
Stream: Foreign Languages Education & Applied Linguistics (including ESL/TESL/TEFL)
This paper is part of the IICEHawaii2019 Conference Proceedings (View)
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