A Corpus-based Study Of The Lexical Density And Readability Of Student's Academic Writings

Résumé: Research into the ineluctability of academic writing as a prominent genre of writing has long been endorsed by a boundless number of experts. Eventually, previous research showed that considerable attention was given to assessing students' lexical and writing proficiency. Nevertheless, the idea of scrutinizing lexical density and readability as preponderant features that would inform evaluators about the richness and the comprehensibility of students' academic writing was only addressed by few academics. For this reason, the present study aims at rigorously evaluating the extent to which learners' written productions are lexically dense and readable and to determine if there exists an association between the aforementioned concepts. In pursuance of these objectives, a corpus-based analytical approach was adopted in which 44 academic essays produced by master one EFL students at Larbi Ben M'Hidi University were scrutinized. AntConc and three other computational tools were used to compute the lexical density and readability depending on Ure's method and Flesch Reading Ease formula respectively. The results obtained from the corpus analysis revealed that students' academic writings are neither dense nor readable for the targeted audience. The correlation findings indicated the existence of a moderate negative association between lexical density and readability. On account of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are highlighted. Reference is given to the limitations that prevented this study from being more sophisticated and recommendations are suggested for further research.

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