Comparing the Two Lexical Density Measures: The Case of Ten Highest Impact Factor Journals in Applied Linguistics
Keywords:
Applied Linguistics, Academic Writing, Lexical Density, Frequency, Grammatical Items, Lexical Items.Abstract
This article studied the lexical density of abstracts published in the 10 highest impact factor journals in Applied Linguistics during 3 years i.e., between 2019 to 2021.The purpose was threefold: to compare the lexical densities of the abstracts studied; to compare the findings of the two lexical density measures chosen for the study; and to study the overall use of salient lexical items that reflect the research trends in these journals during this timeline. A corpus of 1172 article abstracts was constructed and analysed using the natural language processing tool Antconc 3.5.9. It was found that the two results found by the measures have no significant correlation and hence, are very different. Moreover, the most common themes based on the word frequencies were found to be language, learning, English, writing, children, and bilingualism. The findings have significant implications for researchers and academic writers in Applied linguistics and related fields, and those involved in materials development for academic writing modules, especially in ESL or EFL context.
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