Lexical competence and academic writing: learning analytics in a university writing course

Abstract

Based on learning analytics, information related to lexical and scriptural performance was collected in 36 texts produced by students belonging to a higher education writing course. This information not only allowed to make pedagogical decisions in the short term, but also to plan an investigation on the relationship between both competences. The article presented here addresses the second challenge posed, and its objective is to identify the relationship that exists between the academic lexical domain and the level of the texts produced by this group of students based on the learning analytics obtained. To do this, a case study was developed, of a pre-experimental and cross-sectional type, in which the quality of the texts written by the students in a writing task is compared with a lexicometric study carried out on those same writings using thefree software Iramuteq. The results indicate that there is a close relationship between academic lexicon and content, but that link becomes less decisive when contrasting academic lexicon with textual quality.

Keywords:
Lexical competence; Academic writing; Learning analytics; Iramuteq; Lexicometric analysis