Analysing lexical density and lexical diversity in university students' written discourse

This study analyses both lexical density and lexical diversity in the written production of two groups of first year students at the Universitat de Valencia at the beginning and end of one-semester teaching period. These results were compared with those obtained by a third group of students aiming at level C2. Lexical density was tested using Textalyser (http://textalyser.net) and lexical frequency used the software RANGE (Nation and Heatly, 1994). Our results prove that the students from both groups at level B1 show the same progression between writing tasks 1 and 3. Furthermore, we can claim that it is possible to obtain a reliable measure of lexical richness which is stable across two pieces of writing produced by the same learners. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.