Indices of lexical diversity have been used to estimate the size of a writer's vocabulary and/or a writer's lexical proficiency for some time. One issue with many commonly used indices of lexical diversity (e.g., TTR and index) is that they vary as a function of text length. Accordingly, much research has been devoted to the development of indices…

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined…

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct…

Lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, is poorly understood. However, lexical proficiency is an important element of language proficiency and fluency, especially for second language (L2) learners. Lexical proficiency is also an important attribute of L2 academic achievement. Generally speaking, lexical proficiency comprises breadth of…

The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy…

With a Finnish-speaking majority and a Swedish-speaking minority, Finland offers a striking contrast in the kinds of cross-linguistic influence that can occur in the acquisition of English in a multilingual setting. While much previous research has looked at the differences between Finnish and Swedish influences, our study compares Swedish…