ITACA (Pre-study)

The aim of the project, which is part of the broader framework of the ITACA project, whose application for funding will be submitted under the Research Südtirol/Alto Adige research call in October 2019, is to conduct a preliminary study on the academic Italian of a sample of Italian-speaking high school students in the province of Bolzano. In particular, the focus will be on the ability of fourth grade students, who have almost reached the end of their schooling, to produce well-structured texts from the point of view of text coherence, a strong predictor of the general quality of writing and of the maturity of the academic language adopted by the writer. To do this, the sample will be asked to write two texts, a summary starting from two stimulus-texts and an argumentative text, which will then be analyzed and evaluated using grids chosen/adapted for the purpose and NLP tools that can recognize explicit and implicit discourse relations. In addition, students will take an Italian proficiency test and complete a questionnaire on their reading habits and motivation to write.

The result will be an initial - albeit small - corpus of mother-tongue Italian texts, evaluated, annotated and accompanied by metadata, as well as tested and validated tools to collect information about the textual competence, with particular reference to coherence, of Italian-speaking high school students.