RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEXICAL DIVERSITY AND PROFICIENCY IN ESSAY WRITING AMONG IELTS TEST TAKERS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Lexical diversity is defined as the range and variety of vocabulary deployed in a text by either a speaker or a writer (McCarthy & Jarvis, 2007). According to Ryoo (2018), the method of measurement is counting the number of different words in a text including both content words and function words. In this study, the researcher employed a quantitative research design to investigate and analyze the association between lexical diversity and proficiency in writing argumentative essays of IELTS test takers in the Pakistan context. However, in a bigger part, the researcher used the Lexical Complexity Analyser (LCA) conceived by Lu (2012) for lexical diversity analysis based on different lexical complexity measures of the linguistic feature. For this study, 104 argumentative essays were taken from Pakistani students. The results of the statistical analysis in the current study show that most of the sub-variables of lexical variation exert a weak influence on writing proficiency. The analysis of the data showed a high positive link between a varieties of characteristics that fall under the area of lexical variation, including the number of distinct words (NDW), corrected type-token ratio (CTTR), and root type-token ratio (RTTR).