The purpose of this essay is to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by upper secondary English teachers teaching the course English 7 reach the expectations set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the CEFR. This was done by analysing 26 texts contributed from five teachers with vocabulary profile web tools such as Text Inspector and Compleat Lexical Tutor. The analysis focused on word frequency and the CEFR levels.. The word frequency results showed that the vocabulary difficulty of teachers’ texts deviated slightly of being too simple or difficult for English 7 students, while the CEFR results showed that the vocabulary difficulty was too advanced for English 7 students. Although the results deviated from one another, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts was often similar to each other. Furthermore, the results showed that the vocabulary difficulty often variated between text genres. The study, therefore, reasoned that the English 7 teachers enact their agency by selecting texts that they not only believe are suitable for their students but also will be suitable for students with different language proficiencies. The study concluded that English 7 teachers select texts of similar vocabulary difficulty and that English 7 students read authentic texts that contain advanced vocabulary that goes beyond the expectations of the CEFR. The study also suggested that further research should investigate how the CEFR should be interpreted and that similar studies should include a closer engagement with the teachers to obtain their views on how and why they select particular authentic texts.

The thesis analyses lexical complexity in the written production of L2 proficient learners of English (the highest C2 level). Additionally, it compares L2 lexical complexity with L1 lexical complexity of English native speakers. This lexical complexity is investigated in two key parameters: lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. A quantitative analysis is made by the means of single indicators and is followed by an analysis where composite indicators VOCD-D and MTLD are employed to measure lexical diversity. Lexical sophistication is explored through the English Vocabulary Profile tool (EVP), which categorises words in a text according to predefined frequency word lists (A1-C2 types). The main hypothesis presumed that the lexical complexity of L2 English speakers is inferior to L1 English speakers, despite the fact that their L2 English language competence is at the highest level possible (C2 level), often compared to "native-speaker competence". It was expected that the results in respective groups (L2 and L1 speakers) would be similar. Another working hypothesis is that low- frequency words at the C2 level will be smaller for L2 English speakers than that for L1 English speakers. The data comprises 20 comparable texts of L2 proficient English speakers in the dimension of their length (the...