An investigation into the lexical density and readability of Non-English majored first-year students' writing at Hanoi National University of Education

The principal objective of this investigation "An investigation into the lexical density and readability of Non-English majored first-year students’ writing at Hanoi National University of Education" is to evaluate the lexical density and readability in the writings of first-year Mathematics-majored students with dual major in English at Hanoi National University of Education. The study shows that students can only achieve the average level of both lexical density and readability, which suggests that they need to enhance their writing skills with more complex grammar and vocabulary.
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An investigation into the lexical density and readability of Non-English majored first-year students’ writing at Hanoi National University of Education KỈ YẾU HỘI NGHỊ SINH VIÊN NGHIÊN CỨU KHOA HỌC NĂM HỌC 2013-2014AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE LEXICAL DENSITY AND READABILITY OF NON-ENGLISH MAJORED FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS’ WRITING AT HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION Nguyen Ngoc To Ngan, Class K61A, Faculty of English Instructor: Lưu Thị Kim Nhung, M.A Abstract: The principal objective of this investigation is to evaluate the lexical density and readability in the writings of first-year Mathematics-majored students with dual major in English at Hanoi National University of Education. The data were collected from 26 written products, using two methods in calculating lexical density and readability proposed by Ure (1971) and Flesh (1994) respectively to with the aid of some online text analyzers. The study shows that students can only achieve the average level of both lexical density and readability, which suggests that they need to enhance their writing skills with more complex grammar and vocabulary.I. INTRODUCTION1. Background Non-English majored students of Hanoi National University of Education arerequyred to study English at the very first semester to serve the purpose of study, researchand teaching in the future. Despite of receiving enthusiastically guidance of Englishinstructors from Faculty of English, those students still cannot get intensive training andpractice as English majors. Recently, Faculty of Mathematics integrated English into thecurriculum for 50 Mathematic majored students to equyp them with English languageskills for their teaching Mathematics in English in the future, which leads to greaterconcern when they are not majored student, but with much higher graduation requyrementfor the language comparing with other non-English majored students. In this investigation,some written products of those students are analyzed and evaluated through twodescriptive parameters: lexical density and readability. These two indices are notcomprehensive assessment of one‟s language competence, but can show the quantifiednotion of text complexity, which can provide a very first and relative look at theirproductive ability.2. Purpose of the study This study was conducted with the purpose of examining the lexical density andreadability of written products of Mathematic majors who are trained to teach Mathematics inEnglish in the future, from which an outlook of their writing competence could be envisioned.This study does not look into every aspect of written work, but only the quantitative one.3. Research questions The study mainly addresses the following two questions: What are the lexical density and readability of non-English majored first-yearstudents‟ writings at Hanoi National University of Education? What can be inferred from those factors? 467 KỈ YẾU HỘI NGHỊ SINH VIÊN NGHIÊN CỨU KHOA HỌC NĂM HỌC 2013-2014II. LITERATURE REVIEW1. Lexical density In discourse analysis (Ure, 1971), the concept “lexical density” is used to describethe proportion of lexical words (content words) to the total number of words in eitherspoken or written form of language. By examining this, we can receive “a notion ofinformation package” (Johansson, 2008), which means the more lexical words the textcontent, the more information we can exploit from it. The formula proposed by Ure (1985): Lexical density (%) = (Number of lexical words/ Total number of words) x 100 In order to actually calculate the lexical density of a text, the term “lexical words”should be clarified. Along with the introduction of the concept “lexical density”, Jane Ure(1971: p.445) gave out the distinction of lexical words and non-lexical words. Languagescomprise lexical words which are the primary carriers of meaning and non-lexical wordswhich do not have lexical function, but purely in terms of grammar. According to Ure, aword means an orthographic word, and a lexical item such as “turn out” is counted as twowords: “turn” is a lexical word, while “out” is a non-lexical word. It can be regarded thatlexical words belong to the open class and non-lexical words belong to the close class. Later, the development of the concept “lexical density” was marked when Hallidayfurther refined Ure‟s formulas as his first approximation to measure lexical density.Halliday (1985) also identified grammar items, or function words as a close system ofdeterminers such as articles, pronouns, most prepositions, conjunctions, some classes ofadverb and finite verbs, and lexical items or ...