Lexical Profiles of Korean EFL Summary Writing From Online Spoken Texts

Young-sook Ryoo (유영숙)

Lexical Profiles of Korean EFL Summary Writing From Online Spoken Texts

Modern English Education
Abbr : MEESO
2016, 17(3), pp.79-97
Publisher : The Modern English Education Society
Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Language Teaching
Published : August 31, 2016

Young-sook Ryoo ¹

¹서울시립대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study explores Korean university students’ vocabulary use in summary writing from three different spoken texts. One hundred and thirty eight summary writing samples from 46 first-year university students were analyzed using VocabProfile to see whether the three spoken texts lead to different lexical profiles according to source texts and English language proficiency levels (vocabulary and reading scores on TOEIC). VocabProfile is an online program that classifies words in texts into first (K1) and second thousand (K2) levels, academic words (AWL), and the remainder or off-list words (OLW) based on word frequency lists. The data analysis revealed that students’ lexical profiles in summary writing from three source texts were significantly different from each other with respect to all words except for AWL. Especially, the lexical distribution patterns in the summary writing samples were very similar to those in the three source texts. In terms of English proficiency levels in reading and vocabulary, no significant difference in lexical profiles was found according to students’ reading scores, while students’ vocabulary scores yielded significant differences in CW and OLW of the third source text, with no differences in the other two written summaries from the rest of the source texts. These findings suggest that, in comparison to reading and vocabulary proficiency, source text has a greater influence on Korean EFL learners’ vocabulary use in summary writing. Also, vocabulary scores are more predictive of Korean EFL learners’ vocabulary use in their summary writing than reading scores.

KEYWORDS

summary writing, lexical profiles, spoken source text

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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