Blir studenternas språk sämre?

• In Sweden, there has since 2013 been a debate in public media, where university professors, mostly from departments of history, have argued that today’s students entering university are much less accomplished than earlier students when it comes to basic Swedish language skills. According to the debate, both the spelling and grammar of Swedish students are weak. The first signs of this are said to have been observed in 2010. In order to objectively study the language skills of Swedish first-year university students, we have constructed a tool, based on the Swedish spell checker Stava and the Swedish grammar checker Granska, that measures the language skills that, according to the critics, have been deteriorating during the last 3–4 years. We have collected two corpora of authentic first-year student essays from two Swedish universities. Each corpus contains essays from six different years. The results show, surprisingly, that the language skills of the studied groups of students have not deteriorated during the period. If anything, the skills have slightly improved regarding the level of difficulty of the language.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Computer Science

Datalogi

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)