Lexical Richness in the Texts of Norwegian Lower Secondary School Students: The Effect of Specific Extramural English Activities.

Abstract

This thesis explores the vocabulary of a selection of 8th grade students and the effect that Extramural English activities can have on their vocabulary knowledge. The vocabulary of the students was based on measurements of lexical richness, these were, lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. Other variables such as off-list words and total words were also looked at. The primary focus is on activities such as watching movies/tv-series, listening to audiobooks/radio programs/podcasts. However, other Extramural English activities are also examined with regards to their effect on vocabulary. In this study the data is collected through the TRAWL project, access to student texts, and their answers to a questionnaire about Extramural English activities have been granted through this project. The participants of this particular study consist of 80 Norwegian EFL learners, 36 male and 44 female. All of the participants are 8th graders from the Agder area, and it can be assumed they are near exclusively age 12/13. To analyze the texts of the students a program Cobb’s (2023) Vocabprofile VP Compleat v2.6 was used. A statistical analysis was run on the relationship between total time spent on Extramural English and the lexical richness scores. The statistical analysis required groupings. Two methods of grouping the participants were used. When looking at the time spent on activities individually the time the participants spent on these activities were set as groups. Meaning there was five groups, group 1= 0 hours, group 2 = 0.5 hours, and so on. When looking at several of the Extramural activities combined or when looking at all of the activities combined, the students were divided into three groups, low, moderate, and high. The conclusion from the analysis was that there was no significant correlation between the time spent on activities and the lexical richness scores of the students.