Impact of "Text mining and imitating strategies" on lexical richness, lexical diversity and general success in second language writing.

Abstract

This study aimed to find out the impact of "text mining and imitating" strategies on lexical richness, diversity and general success of students in their compositions in a writing class. The participants (39 in the control group; 59 in the experimental group) of this study were first year students of Karadeniz Technical University in English Language and Literature department in the academic year of 2012- 2013. Students in the experimental group working on model essays were instructed on how to mine and imitate their essays to be more competent in vocabulary while students in the control group were directly instructed on how to write their essays without using any reference book or working on model essays. After treatment to the experimental group, participants were asked to write one descriptive essay entitled "the person you admire" and one advantage disadvantage essay on "employee monitoring". They were asked to write five paragraph essays with at least 250 words. Two corpora of 39 students in the control group and 59 students in the experimental group, (corpus of 15826 and a corpus of 25027 words respectively) were compiled in two months , and these essays were tagged (with Biber tagger's tag descriptions) in order to ease the analysis. Though there is statistically slight difference in terms of lexical richness, the study revealed that compositions in the experimental group are lexically richer than those in the control group. Common nouns and general verbs subclasses were found to be used more in compositions of the experimental group. In addition to that, students in the experimental group got better grades than those in the control group.