Lexical diversity and density in texts written by newly literate students: A descriptive study of individual and dyadic productions

Abstract

Lexical Diversity (LDi) and Lexical Density (LDe) may characterize texts belonging to a certain genre, relating them to its lexical richness and to the amount of information it contains. This study aims to analyze the presence of these two aspects in texts produced by Portuguese 7-year-old students in the same classroom (2nd year), comparing individually written texts and dyad ones. From eight proposals of textual production in which the teacher asked 12 students to invent stories, we constituted a corpus including 24 individual productions and 36 dyadic productions. The unit of measure adopted for LDi was TTR. We calculated the LDe by dividing the total number of lexical items by the total number of words in each text produced. Our results show that the LDe between individual and dyadic texts is stable, with no significant variation among them. However, for LDi, these texts show a greater variation, and an inversely proportional relationship. Comparing the individual productions, we found a tendency to LDe increase, especially in those productions which had a low score in the 1st proposal. Regarding the amount of words per text, there was an increase between the two texts of the same students. In spite of the fact that this suggests that the students started to write longer texts, the decreasing tendency of LDi remained. Keywords: school text, collaborative writing, lexical density, lexical diversity.