A Corpus-based Study on the Lexical Complexity of Writings by Business English Majors in Higher Vocational Colleges

Based on data from two corpora of 82 pieces of writings by Business English majors from a higher vocational college in Shanghai, the paper attempts to make a study of the lexical complexity of those writings. All the data are processed oneline by the Web-based Lexical Complexity Analyzer, and then processed with the corpus tool AntConc and IBM SPSS Statistics 20. The findings include: First, the students’s proficiency is getting improved in their writing with time passing and through more writing pratice. Second, the writings by vocational college students are lack of nouns and verbs in varied forms. Third, their writings are sometimes full of adverbs in colloquial form. Finally, some corresponding pedagogical suggestions are put forward on how to improve teaching the writing course.