"Valutare la comprensione scritta in italiano LS attraverso i testi letterari: il progetto AXIO-LOGOS"

As ‘authentic materials’, literary texts represent a resource for promoting the learning of second and foreign languages ​​(L2/LS). This study intends to investigate the validity of the use of literary texts for the evaluation of written comprehension. In particular, the present research examines the effect of literary texts on the performance of Italian LS exam candidates and the characteristics of texts (lexical and syntactic profiles) that influence their choices in a written comprehension test within the system of State certification of knowledge of Italian LS in Greece (KPG). To this end, the article presents the first results of the AXIO-LOGOS project, concerning the definition of a literary texts corpus, divided into categories with respect to the linguistic level and other textual and extra-textual characteristics. 210 tests were analysed by students from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki who took the pilot B-level Italian language exam, in which 50% of the tests included literary texts and the other 50% journalistic texts. The results did not indicate a noticeable difference in test takers’ performance between tests focused on literary texts and those based on journalistic texts.