AbstractThis study was conducted with three primary goals in mind: (1) to determine how
the academic presentations of native speaking (L1) college students and Englishas-
a–second- or subsequent-language (L2) users compared in their lexical complexity
profiles; (2) to establish guiding baselines of several measures associated
with lexical complexity, which includes lexical density, lexical sophistication, and
lexical diversity as subcomponents of its three-dimensional framework; and (3) to
determine the relationship among the subcomponents. The study was based on
two corpora of L1 and L2 academic presentations (N = 70) delivered by individuals
during regular classes. The analyses allowed us to establish not only the common
lexical complexity ground shared by the L1 and L2 presentations but also some
typical lexical baselines that both L2 learners and instructors should monitor in
courses focused on the use of language for academic purposes. The findings are
discussed in light of their pedagogical implications for language programs that
include in their curricula and assessments the development of presentational
competence in a foreign language.
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