The Measurement of Textual Maturity in Spanish. The Challenge of Overcoming Syntactic Criteria

Abstract

In the field of measurement of textual maturity in the Spanish language, two major problems have traditionally been encountered: (1) the availability of software that exclusively analyzes texts in English, and (2) the fact that syntax has always been the mainstay for determining the degree of complexity of a text. Against this, the program MultiazterTest, which allows the measurement of more than 150 variables in texts written in Spanish, has timely appeared. In previous research, texts by university students of Spanish as an Additional Language in an immersion context were analyzed, but with very particular characteristics: some students were native speakers, some were heritage speakers, and others were students of Spanish as a second language. According to Hunt’s indices, the speakers of Spanish as a second language presented a lower level of linguistic proficiency than the rest; however, the analysis with MultiazterTest offers surprising results, since the text by one of the speakers of Spanish as a foreign language is classified as advanced level and another by a heritage speaker is ranked as elementary. This difference is due to the fact that the assessment includes parameters linked to the lexical-semantic subsystem and does not focus exclusively on the syntactic subsystem.