Lexical vs. Syntactic Competence in L2 English

This article examines the relationship between lexical and syntactic competences of fairly advanced learners of English. The data consisted of written tasks where the subjects were asked to translate a text written in their L1 Finnish into their L2 English. The subjects were participants in an entrance examination, seeking admittance to study English Philology at the university. The results confirmed the findings of an earlier study (Pietil , 2009), where the best candidates were found to manifest almost faultless syntax but produced a considerable number of lexical errors. In the present study, the performance of the 50 most successful candidates in the translation task was further compared with the performance of those 50 candidates who got the lowest grades in this task. The least proficient applicants also produced more lexical than syntactic errors, but the difference was smaller than in the case of the top candidates. In other words, the least proficient candidates had considerable problems with some syntactic features as well. The results seem to imply that lexical and syntactic competence do not develop in parallel. What is more, advanced learners tend to lack precision in their vocabulary.