Die Bewertung von Kohärenz und Kohäsion in narrativen DaF-Texten : eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung sprachlicher Einflussfaktoren

The assessment of written performance in German as a foreign language (GFL) instruction is often based on numerical scales according to descriptive rubrics. Despite the widespread use of human rubrics-based assessment, little is known about the linguistic features that have an impact on human rating. The present study analyses a longitudinal GFL corpus consisting of 60 texts that were rated along rubrics for cohesion and coherence. The human ratings were correlated with over 200 automatically computed linguistic features by means of a correlation analysis and a linear regression model. The results show that texts with a high cohesion score have a high degree of semantic and conjunctive relatedness and an increased use of coreferential cohesion through overlapping stems. A number of texts, however, did not fit this model. To investigate additional explanatory factors, an in-depth analysis of several texts was conducted, targeting the coreference relations at text level. This approach yielded promising results regarding its explanatory power. The results are compared with previous research on English as a FL and implications for writing pedagogy are discussed. Download paper here