(380) School and Gender in Numbers: A Stylometric Insight into the Lexis of Teenagers’Description Essays

Michal Místecký, Lucie Radková

GLOTTOMETRICSIssue 49, pp 52−65 (2020)

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to make use of four quantitative indicators (MATTR, ATL, Q, and VD) to study vocabulary richness, lexis complexity, text activity, and syntactic complexity of Czech schoolchildrenʼs writing tasks. The corpus comprises 60 texts written by elementary-school and secondary-school pupils, distributed equally according to the gender and the education level (30 each); the genre of the task was description (“my bedroom” for the elementary schoolers, and “class/school of the future” for the secondary ones). The research is carried out in three distinct comparisons (schools, genders, and the mixture of both), and the results are interpreted with the assistance of a pedagogical professional. At the end of the study, a detailed summary of the outcomes is provided.

Keywords

MATTR, ATL, Q, VD, stylometry, quantitative linguistics, pedagogy, school, gender, Czech.