Evaluation du niveau lexical et grammatical à l'écrit en français langue étrangère: l'apport des analyses automatiques

The paper addresses the question of whether there is a correlation between the grammatical developmental level and the lexical developmental level in the written production of learners of French as a foreign language. We have applied a number of quantitative and lexical measures and one grammatical measure to 40 texts in French written by two groups Swedish adults with different proficiency levels. All analyses were carried out using different software in an attempt to demonstrate the possibilities of current automatic analysis. For the grammatical analysis we used a system we are currently developing ourselves, Direkt Profil (Granfeldt, Nugues et al., 2005). The results show that even if several measures discriminate between the two independently established groups, there is no simple relation of correlation between them. The measure of lexical sophistication was the only one to show a significant correlation with the grammatical measure used