Discriminating CEFR levels in Greek L2: a corpus-based study of young learners’ written narratives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v6i0.813Keywords:
CEFR, Modern Greek, criterial features, young learners, narrativesAbstract
In line with cross-linguistic research aiming at identifying criterial features that discriminate the CEFR proficiency levels, the present study investigates language elements that are core characteristics of each proficiency level for Greek L2. It is based on a graded corpus of 150 written narratives produced by young L2 learners (aged 8–14) at levels A2 to B2. This corpus was annotated with respect to a set of features at both the sentence and discourse level, such as clause subordination, connectives, modifiers and grammatical accuracy. Statistical analysis identified certain aspects of these features that discriminate language proficiency levels in L2 Greek narratives and are put forward as criterial features. These include the frequency of dependent and centre-embedded clauses, the gradual decrease of additive and the emergence of contrastive and inferential connectives, the felicitous use of clitics, as well as the use of evaluative adverbs and adjectives.References
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Copyright (c) 2015 Maria Giagkou, Vicky Kantzou, Spyridoula Stamouli, Maria Tzevelekou
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