Customizing Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) Software to Promote Academic Writing

The current interest in Assessment As Learning has encouraged new perspectives in language assessment, including a reappraisal of some established language tests. This paper reports on a study that explores the potential of a customized version of the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) as a learning tool. LFP was developed in 1995 by Laufer and Nation [1] and was originally intended for assessment purposes. The software provides a profile of a piece of writing by assigning each of the words to its frequency level in English. When used by language learners rather than teachers, LFP allows students to check the lexical richness of their written texts and make appropriate adjustments to the vocabulary content before submitting a final draft. Lexical richness has been identified as one of the most important features of second language writing and can determine the quality of a text in the eyes of independent judges. In the present study, the LFP software was reconfigured to replace the original frequency-based wordlists with Hong Kong's new official English wordlists for primary and secondary schools plus the prescribed academic and general words of the Year 1 English curriculum of a Hong Kong university. This customized version of LFP allows students to see the extent to which their writing reflects their local vocabulary curriculum. By contrast, the original LFP only shows the representation of different lexical frequency levels in a piece of writing. It seems reasonable to assume that a LFP based on local lists is likely to be more meaningful to learners who use the software to monitor and redraft their written output. The results of the study, which examined initial and revised drafts produced by undergraduate (n=20) and research postgraduate (n=20) students, suggest that language learners can benefit substantially from the feedback provided by a customized version of LFP.