ITACA

Coherence in academic Italian

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The hypothesis behind the ITACA project - Coherence in academic Italian - is that the academic writing of upper secondary school students is diversified and incomplete and that their written productions reflect motivational, sociolinguistic and behavioural factors. The project’s objectives are:
1) analysing texts written by a significant sample of about 500 native Italian speakers (L1) in upper secondary schools, with regard to textual coherence and discourse relations of an argumentative type.
2) examining the correlations between the textual skills of the sample and their motivation, sociolinguistic background and behaviour.
To this end, we will collect about a thousand texts (2 per student, a synthesis and an argumentative text) written in Italian by fourth-year students of all the high schools in the Province of Bolzano. The students will also take a language competency test in Italian and a questionnaire on specific factors related to writing and reading. Eurac Research’s working group, with a team of specially trained staff, will evaluate the quality and degree of coherence of the texts and annotate discursive relations. Annotation will happen both manually and automatically, with the help of NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods and their recent applications for Italian. Appropriate control measures will ensure that the tools can be used reliably for data collection, analysis and evaluation.
The main expected results are:
1) A final report.
2) Recommendations for the valorisation and promotion of writing that will support representatives of school policy, teachers, students and parents in implementing initiatives and strategies to foster the acquisition of good text writing skills.
3) A learner corpus, annotated with information on discourse relations and described by metadata, which shall be available for (free) consultation and download on Eurac Research’s website.
At international level, ITACA is a contribution to the few empirical studies on academic writing in L1 with a focus on textual coherence and in a language other than English.
At national level, the elements of innovation are to be found in the focus on coherence, in the combination of different approaches (textual linguistics, sociolinguistics and NLP), as well as in the size of the sample and the use of different tools for data collection and analysis. The last two are elements that increase the generalizability of the results.
At local level, ITACA is the first study ever on writing competency in Italian (L1) and therefore fills a research gap. It completes research carried out so far on German L1 and Italian L2.
Finally, the use of semiautomatic methods for the analysis of textual coherence is the first application on written texts of Italian L1 learners.

Publications
Sulla definizione di coerenza testuale: dizionari e ricerca a confronto verso un modello operativo per le classi del ciclo superiore
Zanasi L, Bienati A, Vettori C (2024)
Journal article
Ladinia: sfoi cultural dai Ladins dles Dolomites

https://doi.org/10.54218/ladinia.48.243-256

La scuola e le altre lingue? Una riflessione epistemologica sugli usi linguistici in contesti scolastici
Platzgummer V, Bienati A, Lopopolo O, Leone-Pizzighella AR (2024)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: AItLA 2024| XXIV Congresso Internazionale dell'Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata | Pavia : 21.2.2024 - 23.2.2024

Can BERT be a fussy proofreader?
Pellegrino F (2024)
Internet

More information: https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/connecting-the-dots/can-bert- ...

https://doi.org/10.57708/bf764wxxkseek4hu4e9-ibg

Discourse markers in the curricularization of ‘academic language’: a mixed methods analysis of tipo and praticamente in Italian secondary schools
Leone-Pizzighella AR, Bienati A, Frey JC (2024)
Contribution in book
Contesti, pratiche e risorse della comunicazione multimodale

More information: http://www.aitla.it/images/pdf/StudiAItLA18/009_Leone-Pizzig ...

Nato ai bordi di periferia: l’italiano scritto degli apprendenti altoatesini italofoni
Vettori C, Zanasi L (2024)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: XVII Congresso della Società internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia italiana | Turin | 22.5.2024 - 24.5.2024

More information: https://www.silfi.eu/congresso_silfi_2024_programma_scientif ...

In viaggio verso ITACA: la coerenza testuale come meta della scrittura scolastica. Proposta di una griglia di valutazione
Bienati A, Vettori C, Zanasi L (2023)
Journal article
Italiano a scuola

More information: https://italianoascuola.unibo.it/article/view/14830/15638

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2704-8128/14830

Defining a connective by the company it keeps: A corpus-based study on students’ (creative) ways of expressing causality using polyfunctional ‘e’
Bienati A, Frey JC (2023)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: 45. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft | Köln | 7.3.2023 - 10.3.2023

Argomentare: struttura, idee, parole
Piovan A, Vettori C (2023)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: Argomentare| struttura, idee, parole | Bolzano : 12.5.2023 - 12.5.2023

Socializing the written in the oral: The use of discourse markers by Italian secondary school students
Leone-Pizzighella AR, Bienati A, Frey JC (2023)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: XXIII Congresso Internazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata (AItLA 2023) | Arezzo | 24.5.2023 - 26.5.2023

Essere coerenti è importante anche quando si scrive?
Zanasi L (2023)
Internet

More information: https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/connecting-the-dots/essere-co ...

https://doi.org/10.57708/b175150199

Sulla definizione di coerenza testuale. Dai dizionari ai corpora, un modello operativo per le classi del ciclo superiore
Zanasi L, Bienati A, Vettori C (2023)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: Lessicografia tradizionale e in rete in una quotidianità plurilingue. Dedicato a Luca Serianni. | Bolzano | 30.3.2023 - 31.3.2023

La scrittura argomentativa al termine del II ciclo
Giunta C, Vettori C, Zanasi L (2023)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: La scrittura argomentativa al termine del II ciclo - Workshop per insegnante del ciclo secondario scolastico | Bolzano | 23.10.2022 - 23.10.2023

Development of Explicit Causal Connectives in Italian L1 and L2 Student Writing: A comparison of argumentative texts from lower and upper secondary school
Bienati A, Frey JC (2022)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: 6th International Conference for Learner Corpus Research (LCR 2022) | Padova | 22.9.2022 - 24.9.2022

More information: http://www.maldura.unipd.it/lcr-2022/

L'errore che intriga
Bergonzi V, Vettori C, Bienati A, Zanasi L (2022)
Internet

More information: https://www.eurac.edu/it/magazine/l-errore-che-intriga-lingu ...

Condizioni di coerenza e procedure di coesione nella scrittura scolastica: il caso dei connettivi causali
Zanasi L (2022)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: Seminari CLUB | Bologna | 1.12.2022 - 1.12.2022

ITACA: Giornata della lingua madre
Vettori C, Zanasi L (2022)
Radio-TV

More information: http://www.raibz.rai.it/feed.php?id=15

Linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics: Bringing together two extremes of the qualitative spectrum
Leone-Pizzighella AR, Bienati A, Frey JC (2022)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: SPECK events | Bolzano (online) | 1.10.2022 - 23.6.2023

A day in the life di un (socio)linguista: come si progetta un questionario inclusivo per la scuola?
Bienati A, Vettori C, Zanasi L (2021)
Internet

More information: https://www.linguisticamente.org/a-day-in-the-life-di-un-soc ...

Coerenza e coesione nella scrittura accademica in italiano: il progetto ITACA
Zanasi L (2021)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: Coerenza e coesione nella scrittura accademica in italiano| il progetto ITACA | Innsbruck : 11.10.2021 - 11.10.2021

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