LITERACY SKILLS: Lexical density in the written texts of 10th and 12th grade
Keywords:
Lexical density, written texts, MozambiqueAbstract
This study comes within the scope of the development of Literacy Skills in the school, given its relevance to accompany the evolution of students' written production. This research, conducted in 2017, assumes that the values of the lexical density in the texts of the argumentative register increase as the student progresses in the school years and aims to establish a comparison of the written production of the students of the 10th and 12th grades relative to the density lexical. The study started with the following question: What is the lexical density index in written texts produced by 10th and 12th grade students of some secondary school? The data for analysis are 10 texts produced by 10 students of both classes, from the daytime period, in classroom context, in the Portuguese course. The lexical density formula proposed by Ure (1971) was used as the category of analysis. The results of this study show that students of the 10th class have a higher percentage of lexical density compared to the students of the 12th grade. The conclusions of the study reveal that there are no positive changes in global lexical density when related to school progress, which refutes our research hypothesis. However, taking measurements by word classes, we identified a positive correlation of adverbial and verbal density with school progression, which seems to justify the widening of the sample of this study in order to confirm these results when applied to a database more consistent and representative.
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