Abstract
Academic writing is crucial for communicating ideas among scientists, researchers and academics across various disciplines. It may be an arduous process for students when composing academic texts to meet the university requirements and academic discourse conventions. This research study investigates lexical features of the independent technical essays related to academic writing proficiency in students of Mechanical Engineering. Examining the score of lexical density compared to lexical diversity help educators understand the difficulties that students encounter when composing essays around topics concerning various technical study areas. Correlation between academic and specialty vocabulary in relation to lexical density was investigated to measure the extent to which the variables are related. Lexical density shows the measure of linguistic complexity of 42 university student essays. Based on statistical analysis, a moderate correlation exists between the measure of the academic vocabulary used by the students and the lexical density. A low negative correlation between specialty words and lexical density was found. Syntactic and structural features of the texts are also significant indices of the academic writing proficiency. Computational tools and corpora-based analysis were used for statistical analysis. Outcomes of the research helped identify the students’ lexical needs within academic and content-based discourse in tertiary education and have didactic implications in L2 academic writing courses in compliance with the conventions applied in the university academic context.
Author Information
Martina Lipková, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
Paper Information
Conference: ACE2023
Stream: Foreign Languages Education & Applied Linguistics (including ESL/TESL/TEFL)
This paper is part of the ACE2023 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Lipková M. (2024) Lexical Density in Academic Writing: Lexical Features and Learner Corpora Analysis in L2 Tertiary Students’ Essays and Didactic Implications ISSN: 2186-5892 The Asian Conference on Education 2023: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2024.98
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2024.98
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