Exploring Socio-Variational Patterns in Indian Adolescents’ Lexical Diversity: Insights for Education

Abstract

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, vast data emerged regarding the plummeting literacy and readability levels among Indian adolescents, posing a challenge to address in its present condition of a vastly heterogeneous socio-demographic environment. This study is grounded in Bourdieu and Passeron's (1977) theory, which acknowledges schools as places with societal relevance that perpetuate social inequality. This implies the need to formulate robust policies to address educational inequalities. To this extent, the researchers used an exploratory design to evaluate lexical diversity by purposively sampling 100 volunteer teenagers across three schools. In addition to the data received from school officials, survey questionnaires collected socio-economic information (age, gender, area of stay, socio-economic scale [SES], and school type). The authors used the Kuppuswamy SES scale (2022) to determine socio-economic scale measures, as well as the calculation of Lexical Diversity scores through the computational open-source software TextElixir. The findings reveal that age and gender do not affect lexical diversity. However, school type, SES, and area of stay significantly affect adolescents from the lower social class, who need targeted interventions to bridge gaps of educational inequity. This study addresses the limitations of previous correlational studies by offering educational insights to ensure educational equity amidst prevalent social class inequalities.