Title
Lexical sophistication across languages: a preliminary study of undergraduate writing in Arabic (L1) and English (L2)
Source of Publication
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Abstract
© 2017, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Recent multilingual perspectives view second language writing as part of a language user’s dynamic multilingual repertoire, always occurring in the (cognitive and social) context of some first language(s), and often of first language literacy and/or use of other languages. This paper focuses on one element of written language (lexical sophistication), and examines preliminary findings about this variable across languages in a sample of undergraduate student writers in two quite divergent languages: Arabic (L1) and English (L2). Significant differences were found in students’ use of vocabulary from different frequency bands of vocabulary in their L1 writing, their writing in L2, and a sample of expert native speaker writing in each language. There was, however, little evidence for development in lexical sophistication in either language over sixteen weeks of a semester. Overall, lexical sophistication did not seem to bear a clear relation to academic achievement in either writing course, nor to previous language learning experience, except in one measure of English vocabulary. There is the possibility of a positive correlation between lexical sophistication in the two languages, although this was not significant in this study. Implications for further research are discussed.
Document Type
Article
First Page
992
Last Page
1015
Publication Date
11-17-2019
DOI
10.1080/13670050.2017.1326456
Recommended Citation
Palfreyman, David M. and Karaki, Suha, "Lexical sophistication across languages: a preliminary study of undergraduate writing in Arabic (L1) and English (L2)" (2019). Scopus Indexed Articles. 512.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/scopus-indexed-articles/512