Frequent engagement in extramural English (EE) activities (i.e., English-language activities that students engage in outside of the classroom) has been shown to positively influence L2 students’ vocabulary size, listening and reading comprehension, and oral proficiency (e.g., Sundqvist, 2009, 2019; Sylvén & Sundqvist, 2012). However, while previous studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the relationship between EE and students’ receptive knowledge as typically measured through formal tests, our understanding of the relationship between such activities and students’ production remains somewhat rudimentary (though see Kaatari et al., 2023 and Sundqvist & Wikström, 2015). In particular, as lexical complexity has been shown to be strongly correlated with writing quality (Kyle & Crossley, 2016), it seems that an investigation of the relationship between EE activities and lexical complexity would be a fruitful next step toward increasing our understanding of the role that EE activities play in L2 English writing. Against this background, the present study examines the effect of EE activities on one important aspect of lexical complexity – lexical sophistication – in intermediate-level student writing in L2 English. Furthermore, we test the hypothesis posed in Kaatari et al. (2023) that certain EE activities may lead students to produce more speech-like (or informal) writing.

The study uses data from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC; Kaatari et al., forthcoming), which consists of argumentative texts written by Swedish junior and senior high school students (school years 7–12). SLEC includes data on how many hours per week students (i) read in English, (ii) watch TV shows or movies in English, (iii) engage in conversations in English, (iv) use social media with English content, and (v) communicate in English while playing computer/video games. We also make use of two reference corpora: ICLE-SE (written university-level argumentative texts) and LINDSEI-SE (spoken university-level interaction). The following research questions are investigated:

What effect (if any) do different EE activities and school year have on lexical sophistication?Focusing on EE activities and school year, what differences and similarities are there of lexical sophistication in SLEC vs. ICLE-SE and LINDSEI-SE? 

We use three types of lexical sophistication that have been shown in the psycholinguistics literature to have high validity: contextual distinctiveness (Kiss et al., 1973; Nelson et al., 1998), concreteness (Brysbaert et al., 2014; Coltheart, 1981), and age of exposure (Dascalu et al., 2016). We then fitted one regression model per measure. The results showed that extramural English reading has a positive impact on concreteness. For the other two types of lexical sophistication measures, no significant effect of the EE activities was found, whereas school year was a significant predictor for all measures included. The results further showed that the student texts included in the SLEC are more similar to LINDSEI-SE (speech) than they are to ICLE-SE (writing) in terms of lexical sophistication. Although only small differences were found, the results also showed that the extramural English reading group exhibits most similarities to the university writing in ICLE-SE.

References

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Coltheart, M. 1981. The MRC Psycholinguistic Database. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33(4), 497–505. 

Dascalu, M., McNamara, D.S., Crossley, S. & Trausan-Matu, S. 2016. Age of Exposure: A model of word learning. Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), 2928–2934.

Kaatari, H., Wang, Y., & Larsson, T. Forthcoming. Introducing the Swedish Learner English Corpus: A corpus that enables investigations of the impact of extramural activities on L2 writing. Corpora, 19(1).

Kaatari, H., Larsson, T., Wang, Y., Acikara-Eickhoff, S., & Sundqvist, P. 2023. Exploring the effects of target-language extramural activities on students’ written production. Journal of Second Language Writing, 62, 101062.

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