One part of my research into the effects of an EFL reading scheme on EFL writing performance has been to have 472 narrative EFL compositions evaluated by three EFL teachers. Of six constructs which the teachers were asked to make judgements on, one was vocabulary range.
A second part of my research is to analyse these same 472 compositions using publicly available text-analysis computer software. The programme I am currently using (VocabProfile by Paul Nation and Batia Laufer) produces counts for various lexical features of text, including counts of unique words (i.e. the number of different words which appear in a text, discounting repetition of the same word --- known in the literature as number of types) and percentages of common (high frequency) and less common (low frequency) words within a text.
In this presentation, I hope to compare the objective lexical profiles obtained for 110 compositions using the above text-analysis programme with the subjective judgements on vocabulary range of the human raters.