the role of frequency lexicon in assessing lexical proficiency of persian language learners

the present paper aims to examine the role of frequency lexicon in assessing lexical proficiency of persian learners. addressing the frequency distribution pattern of persian words, the research which is conducted in corpus-based method studies the relationship between words and lexical proficiency as well as derives the frequency lexicon from persian corpus. to do so, formal and colloquial persian sub-corpora were selected. to assess lexical proficiency, statistical distribution of the words was computed according to the three-level law of zipf-mandelbrodt as a reliable criterion. to measure lexical richness, the lexical frequency profile (laufer and nation, 1995) was employed as it pays special attention to the extent the high frequent lexicon are applied. it is to be noted that most frequent lexemes of both corpora were extracted after doing lemmatization. four chi-square tests on 861 common words in four parts of speech showed that formal and colloquial corpora belonged to two different statistical populations in terms of lexical diversity. findings, in addition, revealed that formal and colloquial lexical frequency levels of persian language learners could be effectively used as a tool to assess their lexical proficiency.