Communication students' use of lexis in a writing examination

It is generally accepted that grammatical competence is not a sufficient indicator of language competence, and lexis plays a significant role as well. In the case of students learning English for academic purposes (EAP), the significance of lexis becomes even more evident but also more challenging because of the increased number of words necessary for a successful academic life. Given their relatively limited exposure to academic contexts, this is likely to put freshman students in particular under heavy pressure. This may lead many to depend more on general word lists when they are required to productively use more specialized vocabulary. Students' limited productive knowledge of academic words may also be due to input materials with limited use of academic words. Given the significance of lexical competence for EAP students, in this current study I investigated 20 freshman engineering students' productive use of lexis with a particular focus on the Academic World Lists (AWL) by Coxhead (2000) during the 2013-2014 academic year. The openbook examination papers of the students in the Communication Department at the Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, were compared to the corpus comprising two assigned texts as input materials. An online vocabulary profiler was used for analyses. Quantitative data analysis revealed that the input materials exhibited the qualities of a typical academic text suggested by Coady and Huckin (1997), with 81.9% General Service Lists (GSL) words and 12.6% AWL words. The students were found to rely more on GSL words than academic words compared to the input materials; the difference for the latter being at a statistically significant level of p=0. 001. Certain AWL words seemed to be used at a similar frequency level in both corpora. Qualitative data analysis showed that the students were less likely to use a variety of word forms, and faulty word formations were common in their work. They were also found to exhibit frequent mistakes with spelling, collocations and countable and uncountable nouns. Possible reasons for these mistakes are discussed, and suggestions are given on ways to promote EAP students' lexical competence.