Lexical Richness in Essays: A Corpus Based Study among Indonesian Junior High School Students

This study aims at analysing the lexical richness of junior high school students. Additionally, the aspects included in the analysis were lexical variation, lexical sophistication, lexical density, and the numbers of errors. The data were argumentative essays written by junior high school students Grade 9. The students are from one of the junior high schools in Kabupaten Tangerang. The data were analysed using a web concordance English v.9 named lextutor. The analysis reveal that the essays have a moderately high level lexical density and lexical variation. However, the students still relied on the 2000 most frequent words or K1 words with 68.29% of the total words. This study suggests that educators encourage their students to apply more word variation in their writings to improve the quality of their writings.