Here is my slide show from the ACLA 2010 Conference (Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics).
It was a great conference this year in an amazing city. I have really enjoyed my time in Montreal so far, and I have the added bonus of having uncles, aunts, cousins and my granny here too!
The main thrust of my presentation at this year’s conference was the connection between measures of lexical richness and large scale writing assessments, and the concomitant connection between large scale writing assessments and eventual academic outcomes at the undergraduate level. From this I conclude that lexical richness is an underlying variable of academic success in higher education.
It was very interesting for me to find significant correlations between measures of lexical richness taken in the first year of university studies and the Grade 12 English 30 Diploma Exam as well as the Effective Writing Test. I was then further intrigued by the correlations I found between the English 30 Diploma exam and the Effective Writing Test with GPA at university as well as other measures such as academic probation and length of program. All of this is in my presentation which you can have a look at here:
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~sdouglas/ACLA2010.pdf
Now I just have to write all of this up, along with my other findings, and I'll have a thesis . . . . . .
