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Frontiers in Educational Research, 2019, 2(3); doi: 10.25236/FER.033038.

A Corpus-based Study on the Lexical Complexity of Writings by Business English Majors in Higher Vocational Colleges

Author(s)

Ronggen Zhang

Corresponding Author:
Ronggen Zhang
Affiliation(s)

Shanghai Publishing and Printing College , Shanghai, 200093
[email protected]

Abstract

Based on data from two corpora of 82 pieces of writings by Business English majors from a higher vocational college in Shanghai, the paper attempts to make a study of the lexical complexity of those writings. All the data are processed oneline by the Web-based Lexical Complexity Analyzer, and then processed with the corpus tool AntConc and IBM SPSS Statistics 20. The findings include: First, the students’s proficiency is getting improved in their writing with time passing and through more writing pratice. Second, the writings by vocational college students are lack of nouns and verbs in varied forms. Third, their writings are sometimes full of adverbs in colloquial form. Finally, some corresponding pedagogical suggestions are put forward on how to improve teaching the writing course.

Keywords

Corpus, Lexical Complexity, Business English Majors, Higher Vocational College

Cite This Paper

Ronggen Zhang. A Corpus-based Study on the Lexical Complexity of Writings by Business English Majors in Higher Vocational Colleges.  Frontiers in Educational Research (2019) Vol. 2 Issue 3: 27-33. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.033038.

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