Textmerkmale als Indikatoren von Schreibkompetenz

In this paper, we will discuss the meaningfulness and productivity of certain learner text characteristics as measures of written language competence. Our analyses are based on a corpus of written L2 learner texts in English, French and German and L1 texts in French and German. All texts were elicited with the same set of 8 tasks, in Switzerland, from learners around the end of compulsory school. One research interest during data collection was the effect of the different tasks on the learner texts' characteristics and quality. Thus, we will show how automatic measures such as text length, MTLD or measures of lexical sophistication perform to distinguish between different groups of texts in our corpus. Based on these, somewhat limited findings, we broaden our analysis to two more qualitative aspects of learner texts, which may yield more concrete evidence of language competence: cross-linguistic influence and lexical quality.