[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 89-121
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print)
Received 05 Feb 2020 Revised 10 Mar 2020 Accepted 20 Mar 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.20..202003.89
Coh-Metrix 프로그램을 활용한 2015년 개정 교육과정 중학교 1학년 영어 교과서 비교 분석
류지수 ; 전문기
제1저자, 건국대학교
교신저자, 건국대학교
A Coh-Metrix analysis of the first grade middle school English textbooks revised by the 2015 National Curriculum
Jisu Ryu ; Moongee Jeon
Copyright 2020 KASELL This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study aims to analyze the differences among seven first grade middle school English textbooks revised by the 2015 national curriculum using Coh-Metrix, a computer tool that has been widely used for analyzing various types of corpora including textbooks, student essays, and literature works. The Coh-Metrix measures selected for the current study included basic counts (number of words, number of sentences, mean sentence length, mean word length), word frequency, word information (imageability, concreteness, age of acquisition), lexical diversity (type-token ratio for content words), content words (number of nouns, number of verbs, number of adjectives, number of adverbs), personal pronouns (first person pronouns, second person pronouns, third person pronouns),　 connectives (causal connectives, additive connectives, temporal connectives), standard readability scores (Flesch Reading Ease score, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score), syntactic complexity (noun density score, number of words before main verbs), co-reference cohesion (argument overlap for adjacent sentences, argument overlap for all sentences), and semantic similarity (LSA cosine for adjacent sentences, LSA cosine for all sentences) measures. The findings of this study showed that there were differences among seven first grade middle school English textbooks for the majority of the Coh-Metrix measures including basic counts, word frequency, word information, lexical diversity, content words, personal pronouns, connectives, readability, syntactic complexity, co-reference cohesion, and semantic similarity. There were also wide discrepancies in the measures among chapters of each textbook. These results afford several pedagogical and psycholinguistic implications for the development of English textbooks for EFL learners.