This study investigated the relationship between lexical richness in L2 writing and overall L2 proficiency. Three measures of lexical richness were identified and operationalized, i. e. lexical density, lexical sophistication and lexical diversity. The study collected 48 sets of texts written by learners at different proficiency levels from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English), and the learner texts were analyzed for lexical richness using a web-based lexical complexity analyzer. The quantitative analysis revealed a lack of significant difference in lexical richness between different proficiency levels . Relevant pedagogical implications were discussed.
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