Analysis of Lexical Complexity in Korean EFL Students’ Narrative Writing

The present study investigates the degree of lexical complexity in Korean EFL college students’ narrative writing. This study was based on data provided by 319 female college students, who participated in a web-based writing test with a given topic, and their writings were scored by e-rater？？. All of the scored writings were divided into four proficiency levels to compare the level of lexical complexity and consisted of three sub-dimensions: lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. In order to assess the lexical complexity, nine sub-variables were analyzed using the L2 Lexical Complexity Analyzer. The results revealed that only lexical variation showed significant progress tendencies as L2 writing proficiency increased. Otherwise, lexical density and lexical sophistication did not indicate significant group differences, regarding the different proficiency levels. Based on the overall findings of the study, lexical variation showed better significant group differences among lexical complexity across L2 proficiency levels, and in particular, CTTR and RTTR were the most reliable predictors to indicate the group difference in narrative writing.