Shiraz University Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly 2981-1546 40 4 2021 11 01 A Corpus-based Analysis of Lexical Richness in EAP Texts Written by Iranian TEFL Students 61 90 6261 10.22099/jtls.2021.40043.2960 EN Masoud Azadnia Department of Foreign Languages, Naein Branch, Islamic Azad University, Naein, Iran 0000-0001-5425-7862 Journal Article 2021 03 28 <strong>The literature on second/foreign language (L2/FL) discourse is replete with corpus-based studies into the use of various features representing lexical proficiency. Nonetheless, the lexical construct of English for academic purposes (EAP) texts developed by postgraduates majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) still sounds like a relatively unexplored domain that merits further multi-dimensional investigation. To narrow the gap, the authors in the current study set out to evaluate the lexical richness of a corpus containing doctoral dissertations written by Iranian TEFL students in terms of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication. Taking advantage of the computational tool Coh-Metrix to analyze the lexical features, the corpus was analyzed in comparison with a first language (L1) baseline containing doctoral dissertations written by English native speakers. The comparative analysis of the L1 and L2 corpora revealed that the texts written by Iranian TEFL learners were lexically less diverse but more sophisticated. Additionally, the lexical density of the L2 corpus exceeded that of the L1 one in terms of nouns and adjectives. Based on the results drawn from a discriminant function analysis (DFA), the features representing lexical sophistication and density were found to be the best predictors of lexical richness since they could significantly discriminate between the two sub-corpora. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of evaluating and enhancing the lexical richness of FL/L2 written discourse.</strong> https://tesl.shirazu.ac.ir/article_6261_8cea848b3dd5c46d3e8975abe3fc5bb7.pdf