Análisis contrastivo de pruebas de producción escrita en contexto presencial y en contexto online: nivel de estrés, fiabilidad de la prueba y análisis de errores

Written production tests are one of the most common means to assess the skills’ level of foreign language students. They are also one of the resources that most lends itself to a detailed language skill’s analysis by studying the corpora provided by the students. However, due to the COVID-19 health emergency, many teachers have been forced to carry out this type of tests online. While teachers have been able to retain some control over the testing, they have also been aware that students can use digital tools to improve their texts, even though it is explicitly prohibited in the test instructions.This article presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the students’ written productions focusing on two main aspects: on the one hand, a formal perspective of the texts; on the other hand, a qualitative exploration of the role that stress can exert during this type of evaluation over time. Thus, these written texts are analyzed by comparing the results obtained with two different testing methods: a group of texts produced in a digital context but in a face to face monitored situation, against another group of tests produced online and under online and remote monitoring. The results obtained with both methods were contrasted to infer the level in which these students might have accessed to digitally available linguistic tools.It was observed that the stress level was significantly reduced during the semester. The results also show that students did access translation tools sporadically, though they avoided to use linguistic correcting tools.