A case of Textual Analysis Applied to the University Offerings of the New Courses in Italy

A case of Textual Analysis Applied to the University Offerings of the New Courses in Italy

Claudia , Caruso

The paper is based on a descriptive study of the lexical words used to redefine students’ curricula at the academic communities, in order to improve the quality and the employability of the degrees. The textual analysis was applied on about 990 forms, filled up by the universities to plan their courses and collected in the national database of the Ministry of University and Research, public and available on line (http://offf.miur.it). Thus, focusing on a representative sample of the major public universities by number of students, a multidisciplinary corpus of the offerings of the new courses of the academic year 2011/12 was assembled in accordance with the four areas of disciplines: health, humanistic, scientific and social, for about 62.970 occurrences (tokens). The study aims to achieve the following findings: check the vocabulary of the corpus and provide the measure of lexical richness, based on the ratio of type, token and the proportion of infrequent word, and identify the key-words of the corpora using the co-occurrences criteria. Results, relating to the key-words, highlight that there are evidences of widely using of terminology to describe the need to develop the soft skills and the interdisciplinary competencies, as required by the local and professional market to improve the employability of the degrees.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

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