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A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Inter-Grade Continuity of the Reading Passages of High School Mock CSAT English Tests
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Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the inter-grade continuity of reading passages of the high school mock College Scholastic Ability Test (CAST) English exams by using Coh-Metrix, a sophisticated text analysis tool. In the current study, a corpus consisting of 75 reading passage files, with 25 passage files for each grade level, was built based on the 2023 mock CSAT English exam administered by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which was then subjected to a wide range of Coh-Metrix indices covering various linguistic dimensions. These included basic counts, word frequencies, word features (imageability, concreteness, age of acquisition, familiarity), lexical diversity, personal pronouns, connectives, standard readability scores, syntactic complexity, co-reference cohesion, and semantic cohesion scores. The main findings from the broader literature on language learning and assessment indicated robust inter-grade continuity in the high school mock CSAT English test passages, particularly in terms of word count, average word and sentence length, word frequency, word concreteness, additive connectives, and standard readability indices. These findings suggest implications for improving the construction of reading passages in the high school mock CSAT English tests in terms of other less controlled features.
Keywords:
mock CAST English tests, continuity, corpus analysis, Coh-MetrixAcknowledgments
This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2022.
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