How writing changes in school. Evolution of Italian and writing in State Examination papers

Abstract

Innovations in contemporary Italian manifest themselves daily in the oral, transmitted language typical of "Computer Communication". 3000 State Exam tasks produced from 2000/2001 to 2015/2016, examined automatically through software and analyzed by Italian teachers, offer data on the presence of some evolutionary phenomena in academic school writing. There are tendencies to simplify morphosyntax, to choose the lexicon by assonance and analogy, to use graphic elements to achieve communicative effectiveness. The students' intention is to adjust their writing to models learned at school, but they find difficulty in connecting the semantic level with the morphosyntactic one; at the same time they are looking for new compositional styles, which borrow above all from informal learning of the language. This raises questions for teaching on how to reconcile the accompaniment of the evolutionary process of the language with the development of linguistic-cognitive writing skills, in the presence of an increasingly complex expressive plurimodality and increasingly powerful digital technologies.