Holistic and analytic assessment of functional adequacy

Abstract

This study looks at the correlation between functional adequacy (FA), holistically assessed, and analytic linguistic measures, in a corpus of texts written by Italian monolingual and multilingual primary school pupils. Texts were first evaluated using the FA rating scales by Kuiken and Vedder (2017, 2018), plus one for Coherence & Cohesion from the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001′). They were then coded for a number of features directly bearing on FA and its subdimensions. Results show correlations between holistic scores and analytic measures, such as those between Content and the number of words or secondary idea units (r = .59 / .65). Others were less strong, yet going in the expected direction, e.g. more ambiguous referential expressions were negatively correlated to Comprehensibility. Correlations were generally stronger for monolingual than for multilingual children.