Lexical Richness of One One-Paragraph Comments on Facebook by University Students in ‘Purposive Communication’ Course

Authors

  • Leonardo O. Munalim Sciences, Philippine Women’s University (PWU) PWU), Manila, Philippines

Keywords:

lexical density, lexical diversity, lexical richness, lexical sophistication, Facebook comments, ESP

Abstract

This exploratory study aims to investigate the lexical richness of one one-paragraph comments on articles posted on students’ Facebook groups. It specifically measures the lexical sophistication, density and diversity of these comments. Variations are accounted for based on students’ disciplines such as Tourism and Marketing. A total of 23,502 tokens produced by 36 university students taking Purposive Communication (in English) for the academic year 2019 2019-2020 formed the corpus of the study. D_Tools, AntWordProfiler, TagAnt and UAM corpus tools were used. Results reveal that the overall one-paragraph comments are lexically sophisticated (84.52%); lexically poor in academic and technical words (3.93%); lexically dense (57.84%); and lexically diverse with the D value of 107.199. The Marketing cluster’s levels of sophistication, density and diversity are statistically higher, except for the lexical item of nouns. Implications for ESP teaching teaching-learning, and paragraph quality vs. quantity are offered. Limitations and recommendations are also offered toward the end of the paper.

Author Biography

Leonardo O. Munalim, Sciences, Philippine Women’s University (PWU) PWU), Manila, Philippines

Dr. Munalim obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Philippine Normal University; finished a certificate in distance education from University of the Philippines Open University; and is associated with Journal of English as an International Language Language, Asian ESP Journal, TE SOL International Journal Journal, IAFOR Journals, and other SCOPUS SCOPUS-indexed journals. He is the Research Director at PWU.
Email: lomunalim@pwu.edu.ph

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Published

2021-11-12

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