Article In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research: Online-First Articles

Vocabulary sophistication in children’s L2 school writing

ORCID logo | University of Exeter
| University of Oslo
| University of Oslo
This paper tests three hypotheses about written vocabulary in child L2 English. Specifically, as children mature, (1) the mean frequency values of the nouns they use increase; (2) the mean frequencies of other parts-of-speech decrease; (3) the use of academic vocabulary increases only in certain types of writing. Using a corpus of writing by children in Norway, hypothesis 1 was confirmed up to the mid-teenage years. The mean frequency values of nouns then decreased. Analysis showed that the early increase is due to decreased repetition of low-frequency topic words. After age 15, frequencies drop as the main source of vocabulary moves from a region around the 150th most frequent lemma to one around the 550th. Hypotheses 2 and 3 were partially confirmed. Mean frequencies of non-nouns decreased in non-stories after Year 9. Non-stories became more academic across school years. Stories had much lower scores overall but also showed an increase at Year 10.
Keywords: school writing, writing development, vocabulary sophistication, school vocabulary, academic vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Lexical sophistication
    • 1.2Lexical sophistication and word frequency: POS as a mediating variable
    • 1.3Lexical sophistication and academic vocabulary: The mediating role of text type
    • 1.4Hypotheses
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Measures of vocabulary frequency and academic vocabulary in learner texts
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Testing the hypotheses
    • 3.1Hypothesis 1: Mean frequency values for noun lemma tokens increase across year groups
    • 3.2Hypothesis 2: Mean frequency values for verb, adjective and adverb lemma tokens decrease across year groups
    • 3.3Hypothesis 3: Use of academic vocabulary increases across year groups in academic writing, but not in non-academic writing
    • 3.4Exploring the hypotheses further
      • 3.4.1Year 8 vs. Year 10 non-stories
      • 3.4.2Year 11 vs. Year 10 & Year 8 non-stories
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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