| Project/Area Number |
18520463
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Ritsumeikan University |
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Principal Investigator |
ASAO Kojiro Ritsumeikan University, College of Letters, Professor (40102462)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2006 – 2007
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2007)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,020,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥120,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥520,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥120,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
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| Keywords | English / text / vocabulary / profile / genre / speech level / difficulty / style / コーパス / 辞書 / 頻度 / 連語 |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research was to develop procedures of creating lexical profiles of English texts. Textual difficulty is a result of multiple features : lexical difficulties, genres, and speech levels. It is not fruitful to attempt to indentify the textual and lexical features with one single index. Instead this research has employed an alternative approach in which the textual properties are presented in a lexical profile, or a set of descriptions of separate dimensions, so the reader will be able to evaluate the textual difficulty.
In order to identify lexical features that contribute to the genre difference, subcorpora of Brown Corpus were compared with each other. Words that appear in each frequency list were sorted out to create sets and complementary sets of words that are typical to each category. The profiles were then compared with the results obtained from Frown Corpus in order to evaluate the procedure. Lexical distributions varied greatly from genre to genre. Yet, during the process of the investigation, it was also found that even within the same genre topics of texts were responsible for lexical variance.
The sentence length was another feature that varied from genre to genre. The length of T-unit was a more reliable index that indicates textual difficulties. The length of T-unit varied greatly within the genre of imaginary prose. This is probably because writers are intentionally varying the sentence length in order to describe the change of mental attitude of characters.
Written and spoken texts differed greatly in terms of lexical features. Spoken texts use more prefabricated expressions. It is most clearly distinguished from written texts by the existence of false starts. Texts written by learners are less distinct in style probably because an awareness of the distinction between spoken and written discourse is not yet fully developed.
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