Are University Students Good at Italian?

Is the Italian language really undergoing a progressive and inexorable decline? Have the students’ language skills really deteriorated? The project, Univers-ITA. The written Italian of university students: sociolinguistic background, typological tendencies, educational implications coordinated by Prof. Nicola Grandi of the University of Bologna and involving the universities of Macerata, Pisa and the University for Foreigners of Perugia, seeks to answer these questions.

To assess whether these widely held beliefs—common in public opinion and shared by many university lecturers—actually reflect reality, an interdisciplinary research group carried out the first systematic mapping of the formal writing skills of Italian university students.

The research, carried out on a sample of more than 2,000 students from over 40 Italian universities, representative in terms of geographical and disciplinary areas, drew on a synergy of linguistic, computer science, statistical, educational and sociological expertise.

The project’s dataset, which includes comprehensive metadata on the 2,137 collected texts, enables statistical analysis of the correlations between writing skills and socio-biographical variables. For example, it allows researchers to assess the skills of students from specific disciplinary or geographical areas, or grouped into additional subcategories (such as those who read more or less, or those who attended a grammar school, and so on).

The work carried out led to the construction of three linguistic corpora capable of providing an overview of the formal written production of students within the current configuration of our language system, which revolves around two standards: the "traditional" one and the so-called neo-standard (or Italian of average use), a variety that has become established in recent decades.

Before Univers-ITA, it was common to hear—based on personal impressions—that students wrote worse than they did a few years ago. The scientific community now has tools to document this crucial segment of the Italian linguistic system with genuine and verifiable data.

At the same time, universities will have the opportunity to design educational interventions based on the real needs of students. For example, the MOOC on punctuation by the Pisa research unit, which specifically addresses the issue of language teaching.

The first results of the research project are collected in the book "L'italiano scritto degli studenti universitari” (The written Italian of university students), which is available for free download