Lexical Richness in Research Articles Written by Iranian and Foreign Writers

This study aimed at investigating lexical richness in the articles written by Iranian and foreign scholars. To this end, a quantitative descriptive design was used. As the corpus of this study, 34 English Language Teaching (ELT) papers were randomly selected from different ISI and Academic-Research journals. 17 papers were written by Iranian researchers and 17 by foreign researchers. The journals from which the papers written by foreign writers were selected are EAP Journal and System. The journals from which the papers written by Iranian writers were selected are Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics and Journal of Teaching Language Skills. Analysis of the corpus was done based on the framework proposed by Lei and Yang (2020), wherein lexical richness was measured in three dimensions including lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. To analyze the data, descriptive as well as inferential statistics were used. The findings revealed that the median score of the lexical diversity, lexical density and lexical sophistication of the papers written by the foreign researchers were higher than those of the papers written by the Iranian researchers. To examine whether this difference is significant, Mann-Whitney U test was run and the results confirmed that there is a significant difference between the three dimensions (i.e., lexical diversity, lexical density and lexical sophistication) of the lexical richness of the papers written by Iranian and foreign scholars. The findings of this study could be considered by EFL learners/teachers, curriculum planners and researchers.