| Lexical sophistication in academic writing: An analysis of L2 texts produced by Indonesian students staying in Jakarta and in the Netherlands. The study of lexical sophistication became an intriguing discussion among scholars. Some studies about lexical sophistication in oral and written texts have been investigated. Some researchers believed that learners who stayed abroad gave positive impacts on lexical development and brought differences on the results (Malvern & Richard, 2002; Tracy-Ventura, 2017). This condition might be inapplicable in all conditions. Due to that conditions, this study reports the findings in investigating lexical sophistication in the written discourse of Indonesian EFL learners. This study investigates the differences and similarities on the employment of lexical sophistication of groups of students who stayed abroad in the Netherlands and staying in home-country (Jakarta). This study also identifies and classifies the instances of the academic words and academic formulaic sequences from the participants’ writing productions. The main data of this study are obtained from 40 writing compositions which are produced by 40 students at high school levels: 20 students from IDNL and 20 students from IDPN. The gauge was done based on the calculations of Lexical Complexity Analyzer (LCA) focusing on the lexical sophistication’s indices and the identification of AWL and AFL. In terms of lexical sophistication, the index result shows that there was no significant difference on the employment of lexical sophistication between Indonesian learners in Jakarta and in the Netherlands. It was found that the two groups shared similar patterns of lexical sophistication. Seen from the instances, students in home-country were able to generate more various sophisticated words rather than students who stayed abroad. In addition, this study also found that learners in two groups tend to employ advanced words from sub-list 1 until 3 in the AWL sub-lists and none of them could generate the advanced words in sub list-10. Moreover, the most common advanced words are noun and the less common is conjunction and preposition. Interestingly adverb of manner -ly is classified as advanced words. Due to that condition, it is suggested that learners in both countries should enrich their learning sophistication in their writing, especially the use of less frequent sub-lists and less common part of speech. |