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Dr. Scott Jarvis
The 2025 SLATE Research Symposium will be held on May 8, 2025 (Reading Day), College of Education, Room 22
The Symposium will run from 10am to 2pm, including a poster session for student research (11:30-1:00) and boxed lunches for all attendees.
***Deadline for Poster Review is APRIL 15! PLEASE send Kiel Christianson (kiel@illinois.edu) your abstracts.***
Speakers:
Our invited speaker this year is Dr. Scott Jarvis, Professor, University of Northern Arizona and Editor-in-Chief of Language Learning.
TITLE: What is lexical diversity and why is it important to SLA?
ABSTRACT: Diversity is a central element of complex systems like language (Page, 2011). The diversity of words in a speech or writing sample reflects not only the nature and quality of the sample but also the background, language ability, and mental state of its creator. Lexical diversity involves more than the ratio of word types to word tokens; it is also a matter of which words are present, how they are distributed throughout the text, how they interact, what their discursive functions are, how unique (i.e., non-redundant) they are, and what their contribution is to the conceptual clarity and vividness of the text. The purposes of this talk are to describe what lexical diversity is, how to measure it, and why it is important to the field of second language acquisition. I will also present empirical evidence that suggests that competent speakers of a language share an intuitive sense of an optimal level of lexical diversity, and that lexical diversity in natural language is distinguishable from lexical diversity in AI-generated texts. While doing so, I will demonstrate how these insights can inform SLA research, language assessment, and L2 pedagogy.
Our Illinois speaker this year will be Dr. Lin Chen, Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology.
Title and abstract will be coming shortly...stay tuned!