Mohammad Amin Karafkan; Ali-Akbar Ansarin; Yaser Hadidi
Abstract
Among intriguing areas in vocabulary acquisition research are such variables as breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge, and their predictability in writing performance. In this spirit, this study set out to determine how receptive breadth, productive breadth, and receptive depth of word knowledge, ...
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Among intriguing areas in vocabulary acquisition research are such variables as breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge, and their predictability in writing performance. In this spirit, this study set out to determine how receptive breadth, productive breadth, and receptive depth of word knowledge, using word families, predict total writing task score and the vocabulary component of EFL learners’ narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing performance. To this end, by administering Oxford Quick Placement Test to the learners enrolled in an advanced writing course, 70 (49 males, 21 females) EFL upper intermediate learners were selected as the participants of the study. To determine the participants’ receptive depth, and productive and receptive breadth of the word knowledge, the Word Associates Test, the Lex30, and the Vocabulary Size Test were administered to the participants respectively. The participants also undertook descriptive, narrative and argumentative writing tasks. The results of the correlation coefficients and regression analyses of the data specified that: a) receptive vocabulary breadth and depth significantly contributed to both overall writing and vocabulary component of narrative, descriptive and argumentative writing; b) The breadth of productive vocabulary knowledge measured by the Lex30 only correlated with the vocabulary component score as well as the total score of narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing. The implications include the fact that lexical knowledge aspects can be systematically used in both developing syllabus materials and classroom teaching methodologies.
Aso Bayazidi; Ali-Akbar Ansarin; Zhila Mohammadnia
Abstract
Despite the abundance of research evaluating the effects of task complexity, task types, and planning on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of the language produced by learners, most studies have focused on the syntactic aspect of complexity, with very few studies investigating the lexical part of ...
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Despite the abundance of research evaluating the effects of task complexity, task types, and planning on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of the language produced by learners, most studies have focused on the syntactic aspect of complexity, with very few studies investigating the lexical part of complexity. Such studies explored the lexical performance of learners through using merely one measure of lexical complexity (namely diversity). The present study is an attempt to further explore the effects of task type and proficiency level on different aspects of lexical complexity of spontaneous speech monologs produced by intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 35 intermediate and advanced Iranian learners of English performed three different speaking tasks: an argumentation, a description and a narration task. The speech monologs were coded for three different aspects of lexical complexity: diversity, density, and sophistication. Two-way repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted to evaluate the main effects of task type (the within-subjects variable) and proficiency level (the between-subjects variable) on lexical complexity. The results showed that task type and proficiency level both significantly affect lexical complexity in the participants’ task performance. The argumentation task yielded the highest scores for diversity and density, while the highest sophistication score was obtained for the narration task. There was no interaction between task type and proficiency level for the diversity and sophistication scores, and the advanced learners consistently got higher diversity and sophistication scores for all the three tasks, while there was an interaction between the two variables for the density scores; the advanced learners got higher density scores for the description and narration tasks but not on the argumentation task.
