The complex, dynamic development of L2 lexical use: A longitudinal study on Chinese learners of English

Abstract

Abstract This longitudinal study examined the one-year development of 15 university-level Chinese students' English lexical use from a Complex Dynamic Systems (CDS) perspective. Four measures were employed to gauge the participants' L2 lexical development in terms of their use of individual words and lexical bundles. Data analysis at both the group and individual levels, combined with several CDS analytic methods, illustrate that the learners' lexical sophistication, diversity, density and use of lexical bundles followed diverging paths of development. When lexical sophistication stabilized, indicative of the occurrence of the lexical plateau, a more synchronous development was captured by separate lexical measures. The relationships between different lexical measures fluctuated during the course of development with individual learner differences, and the development of lexical bundle use deviated from that of individual words. The findings suggest that different dimensions of lexical use interactively constitute the complex, dynamic L2 lexical system, and the CDS perspective provides a useful framework for examining long-term lexical development.