Docenti cinesi di italiano LS e valutazione di task scritti: tra correttezza formale e adeguatezza funzionale

Foreign language teaching in Chinese universities is described as predominantly teacher- centred, memorization-based and focused on the development of formal accuracy rather than of communicative competence. In the present study, six expert teachers of Italian as foreign language were trained to the use of two different rating scales for assessing writing skills of 156 Chinese university students, learners of Italian. A corpus of descriptions, narrations and argumentations was collected and all the texts produced were evaluated using both the parameters of a Traditional scale (language use, morphosyntactic correctness, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation) and those of a Functional Adequacy (FA) scale (content, task requirements, comprehensibility and coherence and cohesion). First results confirm that the FA scale is a reliable tool for assessing the ease of use and the appropriateness of written productions in foreign language, independently from their morphosyntactic correctness. This evaluation tool can be adopted even by Chinese teachers when adequately trained.