High Lexical Density Research Articles

LEXICAL DENSITY ANALYSIS OF READING TEXT IN BAHASA INGGRIS TEXTBOOK FOR GRADE XI SMAN 2 TEBING TINGGI

This study deals with the lexical density of reading text of English textbook for senior high school. It was aimed to find out lexical density level in the reading text,how is the lexical density distributed across the texts and then why is the lexical density used in the textbook. This study was conducted by using qualitative research.The data of study were the 8 texts that classified by 4 genres in the Bahasa Inggris textbook for grade XI SMAN 2 Tebing Tingi. The data were analyzed by using Eggins (2004) theory. The result of this study: 1) The LD level of text was equal based on Eggins theory. 2) The distribution of lexical density in reading text in Bahasa Inggris textbook as follows: Text 1 entitle “ How to Make Orange Juice” was 0.37. Text 2 entitle “ How to plant Jasmine “ was 0.46. Text 3 entitle “ How to Make Cheese Toast” was 0.37. Text 4 entitle “ How to Make a Pizza” was 0.44. Text 5 entitle “ Earthquakes “ was 0.46. Text 6 entitle “ The Last “ was 0.32. Text 7 entitle "Life and Times of Ki Hajar Dewantara” was 0.38. Text 8 entitle“ Global Warming” was 0.47. 3) Although the reading texts in the bahasa inggris textbook had different genre in each texts but it didn’t influence lexical density of the text because the influencing of the high and low lexical density in the texts were the three points of experiential mode namely action, reconstraction and generalization.

Promoting books and places: A study of adjectival modification in persuasion and description

This is a study of adjectival modification, that is the use of adjectives and adjectival participles, in the genres of book information and place description. Book information represents a genre with a subtle, covertly persuasive function, while place description is taken to have little or no persuasive force. The study starts out with a quantitative element, establishing lexical densities of the eight texts in the data. This is followed by qualitative analyses of the functions which adjectives have in the genres examined. Answers are sought to these primary questions: 1) What is the role of modifying adjectives in the lexical density of the texts analysed? 2) What discourse functions do these adjectives fulfil in the two genres? The conclusions of the study include: 1) High occurrence of modifying items does not automatically equal nominal style. 2) High occurrence of modifying items is not an automatic sign of high lexical density. 3) The frequent use of modifiers in non-fiction is not limited to persuasion, since adjectives are also frequent in the genre in which the descriptive function is foregrounded.

Statistical and Qualitative Analyses of Students� Answers to a Constructed Response Test of Science Inquiry Knowledge

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

Orality and gender: a corpus-based study on lexical patterns in simultaneous interpreting

Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies so far explored several phenomena pertaining to different dimensions of language production. In particular, Laviosa (1998) investigated lexical variety (LV), i.e. linguistic richness, and lexical density (LD), i.e. prevalence of content words, in English original and translated texts and reported a higher degree of both features in the former vs. the latter. Inspired by these results, another study analysed the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC) to verify Laviosa’s results comparing English, Italian and Spanish source and target speeches in these three languages; this study obtained less clear-cut and language-dependent results (Russo et al. 2006). LV and LD in either original or interpreted speeches could be not only language- but also gender-dependent. The present quantitative study showed mixed results depending on the language. Yet, some statistically significant trends emerged, among them higher LD in the speeches produced by Italian female vs. male Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), and higher LV in English and Spanish female vs. male interpreted speeches.

Galen Medical Journal (GMJ) Title Readability Index

Background: Title choice will undoubtedly pave the way for the informed readership to either devour a text or just spurn it. Therefore, authors are duly required to have a deep understanding of titling trends and potential inferences to be drawn by their addressees. As a case in point, choosing proper titles for medical articles is a subject of much debate among researchers to such an extent that it is postponed to be written till the finalization of a given manuscript. Titles form expectations, preconceptions, presuppositions and most importantly judgment on reader’s side. Quality highly-cited research papers submitted to the internationally renowned Galen Medical Journal (GMJ) as a true index of Iranian medical journalism covering varied areas of research in both medical and interdisciplinary fields concerning health-related topics, provide a performance benchmark to firstly evaluate titling trends among Iranian authors, secondly to improve writing strategies and finally to meet international standards. Materials and Methods: To conduct this meta-analysis, researchers collected all articles published by GMJ. 100 titles were randomly chosen to be linguistically analyzed by Advanced Text Analyzer software. All data were fed into MC-Excel to recognize any distributional regularity in titling, subconsciously followed by GMJ authors. Results: The meta-analysis of randomly chosen article titles revealed a well-established trend in high Lexical Density standing above 76.67 for all titles indicating author’s frozen style and academic register in their manuscripts. Moreover, Title Length hits 14.34 on average signifying author’s inclination for longer titles. It might negatively impact the whole discourse due to heavy cognitive load. Gunning Fog Index ranging averagely 16.94 estimates at least 17 years of formal education needed to understand a text on first reading with no difficulty. Additionally, introducing poly-morphemic lexical items into author’s title in nearly all cases, owing to their mental load, augments text difficulty. Conclusion: Authors of medical articles can increase their article’s readability through their acquaintance with text mechanics such as lexical density, Gunning Fog Index and Readability criteria. Authors are strongly recommended to shorten title length, introduce fewer poly-morphemic words and utilize highly frequent mono-morphemic lexical items in order to increase article readability. [GMJ. 2015;4(3):100-3]

Titles in English-medium Astrophysics research articles

In this study we analyse a corpus of 300 randomly selected research paper titles written in English and published between 1998 and 2012 in the most prestigious journals in the field of Astrophysics, an under-researched discipline from a linguistic standpoint. We specifically address issues related to the evolution of titles, their length, their lexical density, their type distribution and their semantic content. Our findings reveal a trend towards relatively long titles with a high lexical density, a preference for nominal and simple titles over verbal and compound ones, a very low occurrence of question constructions, and a prevalence of purpose and results over methods as key research concepts expressed in titles. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies on titles in other scientific disciplines and provide explanations for the differences and similarities observed.

Male-Female Discourse Difference in Terms of Lexical Density

The development of gender roles often begins as early as infancy. Being at the centre, gender manifests itself in any subtle and trivial aspect of our social life. From the time we are very small, it is ever present in any aspect of our life, in conversation, humor, conflict and so on. The overwhelming studies on the differences between men/women speech style represents the significance of the issue. The present study is an attempt to investigate whether the speaker's gender (being a male/female) contributes to the lexical density of their discourse. In other words, whether the lexical density of discourse is sensitive to the gender of the speaker? It is a data-driven, empirical study based on the transcribed recorded talk-in interactions between men and women. Text Content Analysis Tool (TCAT) was used to measure the lexical density of male/female speaker's discourse and to count the total number of words used by male/female speakers. The results of Chi-square test show that there is not a statistically significance difference between the lexical density of men and women discourse (p >0.157). However, there is a negative relationship between the lexical density of discourse and discourse length. In other words, the more word counts (689 words) the lower lexical density (0.33.67%) and vice versa the less word used by the speaker (31) the higher lexical density of the discourse (90.32%).

Spoken and written language

This books identifies the important differences between speaking and writing. Halliday leads the reader from the development of speech in infancy, through an account of writing systems, to a comparative treatment of spoken and written language, contrasting the prosodic features and grammatical intricacy of speech with the high lexical density and grammatical metaphor or writing.

The reading aloud of English Language Texts in simultaneously interpreted conferences

This paper explores an important variable affecting interpretation quality, usually considered a major source of difficulty for interpreters: the situation in which speakers read their texts. In particular, it focuses on the reading aloud of English language texts to be interpreted simultaneously. A corpus consisting of ten authentic speeches recorded during various conferences has been analyzed. Five of them were delivered by native speakers, the other five by non-native speakers. The analysis of the corpus has been performed on the transcriptions of the oral delivery of the written texts. Several features have been analyzed, ranging from the peculiarities of written texts, such as high lexical density and lack of redundancy (i.e. assessment of whether the texts presented such features even when delivered orally) to the departures speakers made from the written texts, to pauses and speech rate. The article concludes with a number of practical suggestions speakers should be advised to follow before reading texts that are to be interpreted simultaneously, in order to facilitate the interpreter's task.