Text Difficulty of English Textbooks for Senior High School and the College Scholastic Ability Test in South Korea

DOI:10.21742/AJEMR.2021.6.1.05

AUTHORS

Hyun-Young Lee,Department of English Education, Kongju National University, South Korea

Mun-Koo Kang*,Department of English Education, Kongju National University, South Korea

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the text difficulty of English textbooks for senior high school and the College Scholastic Ability Test. By comparing the degree of their text difficulty, this study aimed to predict how effectively public education can prepare for the CSAT. To build a corpus, five types of high school English reading and writing textbooks reflecting the revised 2015 curriculum and 2019-2020 CSAT were selected. With Coh-Metrix, the web-based automated language analysis tool, the text difficulty level was measured in linguistic features: descriptive indices, word information, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, standard readability, and cohesion. To compare the measurements and find out if there are any statistically significant differences, an independent t-test is used. In conclusion, most features, except for syntactic complexity and semantic cohesion, showed statistically significant differences between textbooks and the CSAT. This finding suggests that the students who follow the curriculum focusing on the textbooks would find it challenging to accomplish what they expect from the CSAT. To meet the purpose of the CSAT, normalizing public education and easing the burden of excessive learning, a balance between the difficulty of textbooks and the CSAT should be achieved.