engleski

The relationship between self-assessment of language proficiency and measures of lexical diversity and syntactic complexity: The case of heritage speakers of Italian in Croatia

A wide range of tools have been used to assess the language proficiency of bilingual speakers, including heritage language speakers. There are subjective forms of assessment, such as self-reports or self-assessments, and objective forms of assessment, such as analysis of written production elicitations, samples of spontaneous spoken conversations, oral narratives, and standardized tests. Two types of tools were not that often combined. Although self-assessment ratings across single or multiple language domains are a widely used method, their accuracy, reliability, and usefulness have been debated (e.g., Brantmeier, 2006 ; Treffers-Daller, 2015). Thus, there is a need for indices that combine subjective and objective measures and allow for a more in-depth examination of the relationship between these measures (Treffers-Daller, & Korybski, 2015). This study aims to contribute to this line of research by investigating the relationship between self-assessment data and language sample analysis. We focus on heritage language speakers of Italian that live in Istria County, a statutory bilingual county in Croatia. Italophone heritage language varieties in this area (the most prominent being Istrovenetian) date back several centuries and are still used in everyday spoken communication, while standard Italian is mainly used in formal contexts and education (Blagoni et al., 2016). The use of self-assessment and language sample analysis will allow us to obtain information about Istrovenetian, since other objective measures (e.g., standardized tests) are rarely used to assess spoken language varieties. Measures of lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were used to examine whether they reflect the self-assessment of language proficiency of 30 functional Istrovenetian heritage speakers in four domains (reading, writing, speaking, and understanding). Participants’ data were extracted from the Istrian spoken multilingual corpus (Hržica et al., in preparation), which was created using the conversational sampling method. Measures of lexical diversity (Moving-average type-token ratio – MATTR ; Covington, & McFall, 2010) and syntactic complexity (Mean length of communication unit – MLCU ; Heilmann, 2010) were calculated using Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN – MacWhinney, 2000). A Pearson correlation was calculated to test the relationship between self-assessment and language measures. The average self-assessment score correlated positively and moderately with MLCU (r(30) = .513, p < .005). MATTR did not correlate with the average self-assessment score, but the results indicate a trend suggesting this relationship (r(30) = .351, p = 0.57). A Spearman correlation was calculated for each domain of self-assessment. MATTR showed weak positive correlations with self- assessment of understanding (rs(30) = .364, p < .05) and speaking (rs(30) = .388, p < .05), but not with self-assessment of reading and writing. MLCU showed moderate positive correlations with self-assessment of reading (rs(30) =.484, p < .05) and writing (rs(30) = .563, p < .005), and weak positive correlations with speaking (rs(30) = .373, p < .05) and understanding (rs(30) = .364, p < .05). Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. The correlations found between measures of lexical diversity and syntactic complexity and self-assessment scores indicate that these measures are related, suggesting that heritage language speakers may be able to objectively assess their language proficiency in spoken language variety.

language proficiency ; self-assessment ; lexical diversity ; syntactic complexity ; heritage language speakers ; Istrovenetian

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