Vocabulary Change in Process Writing: Effect of Text Structure Instruction

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this study, conducted as a follow-up study of Oshima (2020), was to examine whether Japanese EFL students’ use of vocabulary changed after being given lessons on explicit instruction on text structure and process writing. Two groups of college students—the beginner-level group writing a descriptive essay and the advanced-level group writing an argumentative essay—wrote an outline, the first draft (D1), the second draft (D2), and the final draft (FD), and I examined the differences in lexical richness between students’ D1 and FD with New Word Level Checker (Mizumoto, 2021). The results showed that both groups’ drafts had changed in the number of words used (tokens), the number of unique words used (types), and the number of lower frequency words used. This study’s finding also supports the importance of choosing an appropriate measurement to analyze students’ vocabulary levels. For Japanese students, 1K-word bands, which have been widely used in previous literature, seem too broad to capture their small vocabulary improvement.