Quantitative measures have been widely used in Swedish research on students texts(Hultman & Westman1977, Nyström 2000, Östlund-Stjärnegårdh 2002), often related togrades and to spoken and written style.However, there are few quantitative descriptions of mono- and multilingual students’texts. In our study, we compare 220 national tests in Swedish written by first- and secondlanguage secondary students living in urban areas where the students have variouslinguistic background, gathered within the project Language and language use amongstudents in multilingual urban settings.The purpose of this study is to investigate whether lexical quantitative and qualitativestatistical measures can be used to describe and compare different aspects of this textcorpus. We found four measures that suited this purpose: lexical density – comparing thenumber of content words vs. total number of words; nominal ratio – measuring number ofnominal phrases vs. verbal phrases in a text; word variation index – measuring number ofdifferent words or lexical items found in a text; and word length – describing the length of atoken. The three dependencies investigated were: linguistic background vs. grades, studentvariables vs. quantitative measures, and correlation between quantitative measures. http://demo.spraakdata.gu.se/svesj/publications/asla08_magnusson_kokkina...

@inProceedings{Magnusson,Ulrika2009-17,
	title		= "Quantitative measures on student texts",
	booktitle	= "Papers from the ASLA Symposium in Stockholm, 7-8 November, 2008, Association suédoise de linguistique appliquée (ASLA)",
	author		= "Magnusson, Ulrika and Johansson Kokkinakis, Sofie",
	year		= "2009",
	number		= "ASLA:s skriftserie nr 22",
	isbn		= "978-91-87884-22-1",
	url		= "http://demo.spraakdata.gu.se/svesj/publications/asla08_magnusson_kokkinakis.pdf",
	pages		= "43--56",
}