Lexical Level in English Major EFL Students' Writing: A Learner Corpus Study

This study aimed to investigate the lexical competence of English-major EFL students. The learner corpus comprised 552 pieces of writing by sophomore English majors during five academic years between 2017 and 2021, containing 190,506words in total. The results from Vocab Profile program showed that these students used words contained in the academic wordlist (AWL) at lower rates than what has been suggested by experts. This is probably because they were in their second year studying their first writing course. With less exposure to higher level English, they might not have developed an advanced vocabulary repertoire. However, when considering the AWL words used in each type of paragraph, it was found that the students used AWL words to a higher degree in comparison contrast, cause-effect, and problem-solution paragraphs, suggesting that the type of paragraphs can affect the lexical level of the students. When considering the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English(BNC/COCA) lexical level, the words used were mostly in Base List 1, Base List 2, and Base List 3, respectively. The results from Vocab Profile program indicated that they used vocabulary at a very typical level compared to non-English majors, suggesting that they needed more input to stimulate them to use higher vocabulary levels in other advanced writing courses to attain an effective vocabulary level upon completion of the program of studies