The LEMI team, represented by Karla Csürös, Florina Andercău and Roxana Delia Prohap, presented the paper “Children’s Literature with LEMI: Preliminary Steps in the Development of the First Romanian Text Readability App” (see an excerpt of the presentation below) at the conference “The first Baia Mare Conference on literature for children and young adults”, organized on 8-10 June 2023 by the Department of Philology and Cultural Studies of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and held in Baia Mare.
Presentation summary:
A contrast has pervaded Romanian schooling recently: an ever-increasing interest in reading activities (through numerous school textbooks, auxiliary materials, NGO initiatives, and publishers’ offers) is mirrored by unsatisfactory reading scores in PISA tests (OECD 2019). Having this conundrum in mind, linguists from the West University of Timișoara’s Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities (CODHUS) initiated the LEMI (Lectura pentru mine, EN: Reading for me) research project in January 2023 to produce a tool for assessing children’s literature according to linguistic complexity during initial reading activities (ages 7-11). As a first step, the children’s needs and observations on school reading were surveyed through a questionnaire, with responses recorded from all target groups (teachers, parents and pupils). This paper reports the questionnaire results – favourite literature texts, textbook assessment, and recommendations for children’s literature. Ultimately, we will explain the integration of these results into the future functionalities of the LEMI tool.
Keywords: LEMI, children’s literature repository, text complexity automatic assessment for Romanian, LEMI questionnaire