Lexical frequency profile & vocabulary size in Korean adult EFL learners’ writing genre

The present study aims to investigate how different Korean adult EFL learners’ productive vocabulary uses are among the writings of different genre. For the data analysis, AntWordProfiler was used to find Lexical Frequency Profile (GSL 1,000, GSL 2,000, AWL and others) and vocabulary size using British National Corpus (BNC)/Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in the un-timed writing samples of definition, process, descriptive, and opinion genre. The findings showed that there were differences in LFP and vocabulary size per writing genre, especially, in GSL 2,000 word level. For example, GSL 2,000 words in descriptive writings were used more significantly than process and opinion ones, and those in definition writings more than opinion ones. In the vocabulary size of BNC/COCA per genre, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and 7,000 word levels were used in opinion, descriptive, process, and definition writing genres respectively in terms of about 98% of the word token used in writings. Pedagogical implications are discussed at the end.