Lexical characteristics of young L2 English learners’ narrative writing at the start of formal instruction

Abstract

Studies investigating L2 English receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge in young learners have shown that English can be picked up through exposure outside the classroom. In this study I looked into lexical characteristics of young learners’ writing at the start of formal English lessons in the first year of secondary school (n = 3168). The texts were given a holistic score and several lexical measures were calculated. The results showed large individual differences between learners’ writing. Regression analysis was used to investigate which lexical characteristics predicted proficiency scores. The final model explained 50% of the variance. Similar to what was found in previous research investigating young L2 English learners’ writing I found that a number of broad predictors impacted the proficiency score. These were lexical diversity, word count, total number of spelling errors and percentage of English words used. Additionally, four fine-grained variables predicted the proficiency score: word frequency, trigram frequency, age of acquisition and imageability. The results show the added value of investigating a wide range of variables to shed light on the lexical factors that might impact writing scores, even in beginner and pre-intermediate level L2 writing.