A densidade de ideias e a complexidade gramatical na avaliação da produção escrita em português L2

Advanced L2 written production assessment is difficult to quantify as are learning goals established for this competence in the same level. Correction is not enough. Quality in writing is expected to translate into lexical precision and richness, as well as sentence complexity. In order to measure these characteristics of sophisticated writing, Idea Density and Grammatical Complexity are proposed as assessment parameters as they were explored by Snowdon et al. (1996) and by Kemper et al. (2001) in the Nun Study (Snowdon 2001). Its adoption to the advanced Portuguese L2 learning context (C1/C2) underlied the study of sentences produced in two writing tasks: a synthesis and a writing prompt. First, results were highly variable due to the heterogeneity of the group of participants. Both measures were found to be correlated in both writing tasks, which led to the conclusion that participants who write with lexical precision and richness also produce higher complexity sentences. Lastly, the results confirmed that reading has an influence on writing quality, insofar as the students who usually read as the ones who got the highest scores in both parameters.