Assessing Italian Academic Vocabulary for International Students: an Experimental Test

Academic vocabulary is a key component in studying at university level for non-native international students of Italian as L2 (Gallina, forthcoming). Despite the relevance of the lexical dimension of academic discourse, teaching materials for Italian as L2 do not really support academic vocabulary learning, since they do not give so much space to this 'support vocabulary' (Schmitt, 2010) and in Italian L2 teaching practices, not so much attention is given at assessing academic vocabulary as well.

The main goal of this paper is to reflect on how it is possible to measure and assess Italian academic vocabulary for international students of Italian as L2. I will try to answer the following question: which kind of test is more suitable to give us a measure of academic vocabulary knowledge?

Since at the moment a test to measure Italian academic vocabulary does not exist, an experimental test, designed to assess the knowledge of academic vocabulary by students who are non-native speakers of Italian, has been created on the basis of two lists of academic vocabulary at present existing for Italian: the Lessico della Conoscenza (Ferreri, 2005) and the Academic Italian Word List (Spina, 2010). The test was created in order to include different measures of vocabulary knowledge (Read, 2004; Schmitt, 2010), especially size and depth, such as different kinds of assessment approaches and procedures: discrete and embedded, context dependent and independent. The test includes both receptive and productive measures. Attention has been paid also to collocations which are very frequently used in the Italian academic discourse and some of them were included in a section of the test. The test was administered to groups of international students of level B2 to C2 and also to a group of Italian native speaker students, in order to compare both the results of students of different proficiency levels and of native and non-native groups.

The results of the experimental administration of the test will be presented and discussed and it will be given an overview of possible suggestions for teaching and learning on the basis of the test results.

References

Ferreri, Silvana (2005). L'alfabetizzazione lessicale. Studi di linguistica educativa. Roma: Aracne.

Gallina, Francesca (forthcoming). Studenti internazionali in mobilità: la questione del lessico della conoscenza in italiano L2.

Read, John (2004). "Plumbing the depths: How should the construct of vocabulary knowledge be defined?". Bogaards Paul; Laufer Batia (eds.) Vocabulary in a Second Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 209-227.

Schmitt, Norbert (2010). Researching vocabulary. A Vocabulary Research Manual. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spina, Stefania (2010). "AIWL: una lista di frequenza dell'italiano accademico". Bolasco, Sergio; Chiari, Isabella; Giuliano, Luca (eds.) Statistical Analysis of Textual Data, Proceedings of the 10th Conference JADT (Rome, 9-11 June 2010). Milano: Editrice Universitaria LED.