Tecnologie del linguaggio e monitoraggio dell'evoluzione delle abilità di scrittura nella scuola secondaria di primo grado
Authors: Alessia Barbagli, Pietro Lucisano, Felice Dell'Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni (Sapienza Università di Roma, CNR-ILC, 2014)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
The last decade has seen the increased international use of language technologies for the study of learning processes. This contribution, which is placed within a wider research of experimental pedagogy, reports the first and promising results of a study aimed at monitoring the evolution of the Italian language learning process conducted from the written production of students with tools of automatic linguistic notification and knowledge extraction.

Introduction
The use of language technologies for the study of learning processes and, in more applied terms, the construction of the so-called Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems (ICALL) `and more and more at the center of interdisciplinary research that aims to highlight how methods and tools of automatic language notification and knowledge extraction are now mature to be used also in the educational and school context. On the international level, this is demonstrated by the success of the Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA), arrived puts in this research context, reporting the first results of a study still ongoing, aimed at describing, with means of quantitative and qualitative character, the evolution of the writing skills, both at the level of text content and linguistic skills, from the first to the second class of the secondary school. It is an exploration work aimed at building an empirical analysis model that allows the observation of the processes and products of the teaching of written production. The innovative character of this research in the national and international landscape is placed at various levels. The research described here represents the first study aimed at monitoring the evolution of the language learning process of the Italian language conducted from the written production of the students and with tools of automatic language notification and knowledge extraction. The use of language technologies for monitoring the evolution of language skills of learners drops the roots in a branch of studies launched internationally in the last decade and within which language analysis generated by tools of automatic language treatment are used, for example, to: monitor the development of synthesis in child language (Sagae et al., 2005; Lu, 2007); identify cognitive deficits through measures of synthetic complexity (Roark et al., 2007) or of semantic association (Rouhizadeh et al., 2013); monitor the reading capacity as a central component of language competence (Schwarmend and Ostendorf, 2005; and Petersen, 2009). Take the moves from this research branch, Dell‚ÄôOrletta and Montemagni (2012) and Dell‚ÄôOrletta et al. (2011) they showed in two feasibility studies that linguistic-computer technologies can play a central role in evaluating the Italian language skills of students in the school and in tracing their evolution over time. This contribution represents an original and innovative development of this research line, as the language monitoring methodology proposed `and used within a wider study of experimental pedagogy, based on a significant corpus of written productions of students and aimed at tracing the evolution of skills in a diacronic and/or socio-cultural perspective. The subject of the analyses represents another element of novit`a: `and was chosen the first twentieth of first-degree secondary school as a school area to be analyzed because' and little investigated by empirical research and because' and have been few so far the studies that have verified the effective teaching practice derived from the indications provided by the ministerial programs relating to this school cycle, from 1979 to the National Indications of 2012.

Conclusion
The comparative monitoring of the language characteristics traced in the corpus of common tests carried out in the first and second year was carried out with the aim of tracing the evolution of the language skills of the students in the two years. The ANOVA common evidence shows that there are significant differences between the first and second years at all levels of linguistic analysis considered. For example, compared to the Odi base‚Äô cattery, it turns out that the variation of the average number of tokens per phrase in the two tests of the two years is significant. While the tests written in the first year contain long phrases in an average of 23.82 tokens, the average length of the tests in the second year is 20.71 tokens. Significant `and also the variation in the use of VdB-related voices, which decreases from 83% of the vocabulary in the first year tests to 79% in the second year, such as the TTR values (related to the first 100 tokens), which increase by passing from 0.66 to 0.69. In both cases, such changes can be seen as a result of a lessical enrichment. When it comes to the morphosynthetic level, the characteristics that capture the use of times and verbal ways are significant. At the level of synthetic monitoring, `and for example the use of the object supplement in pre‚Äì or post-verbal position to vary significantly. If in the first year‚Äôs tests 19% of the subject complements are in pre-verbal position, in the second year the percentage decreases by passing to 13%; while in the first year the post-verbal complements are 81% and increase by passing to 87% in the second year. In the tests of the second year therefore is observed a greater respect for the canonical order subject-word-object, closer to the rules of the writing than of the spoken. Although the results are still preliminary compared to the wider context of research, we believe they clearly show the potential of the meeting between computing and educational linguistics, opening new research prospects. Current activities include the analysis of the correlation between the evidence acquired through linguistic monitoring and the process and background variables such as the study of the evolution of the language skills of the individual student.