We Get the Answer we Deserve- A study of vocabulary in a corpus of spoken and written learner English

The present investigation is a study of informal spoken and written vocabulary by advanced learners of English. The students participating in the study are native speakers of Swedish and have studied English for 7-9 years in school before going to university. At the time of the collection of their spoken and written production they were studying English in their third or fourth term at university level. Identical tasks were used in the collection of both the spoken and the written material. The task consists of two parts: topics to talk about and a picture description. My aim was to study the use of active vocabulary in the students' texts to see if there was a difference between speech and writing. I have approached the material from four perspectives. The first two perspectives are quantitative ones. First I studied the type/token ratio, the lexical density, and the use of frequent words in the texts. Secondly, I studied the distribution and use of lexical word classes first in the whole material and then in a limited number of texts from both modes. The remaining two perspectives are of a more qualitative character and are concerned with performance phenomena and learner language. The results show that there is a significant difference between spoken and written texts regarding frequency, type/token ratio, and lexical density. The written texts contain a lower percentage of frequent words in English and have a higher lexical density than the spoken texts. The distribution of word classes is similar to corpus findings regarding native use of English and differs in speech and writing. Various strategies for language production have been identified and categorised, as well as features of interlanguage and transfer from Swedish. A major conclusion is that task design and expectations on output are important factors for learners and their language production.