Italian word lists and academic language: a corpus-based study of student writing

Analyzing vocabulary choices made by students for their writing tasks is important to better understand the way young pupils express themselves in academic contexts. Studies of academic language based on corpora or on word lists have been conducted for many years now, but despite this, there are not many first language (L1) student corpora focusing on academic writing, and word lists are primarily used for analyzing second language (L2) vocabulary. This is the one of the first empirical studies on an L1 Italian corpus of student writing which aims to explore how relevant Italian word lists are for texts written by native speakers, in particular if the words present in the lists are representative of the way young people write. The analyses conducted for this research pave the way for more in-depth examination of word lists, especially for L1 native speakers, and of Italian academic language knowledge and acquisition in high school. Using software for vocabulary profiling and corpus analysis, the potential of word lists will be discussed, to see if they can also be used as a learning tool by L1 students and not just by L2 learners, who were the original target of this type of resource. An exploration of the possibilities offered by using of word lists could also have implications for teaching and for the research focusing on young people and academic language.