초등학생용 영어도서 선정을 위한 한국형 Lexile 개발

Development of Korean lexile for elementary school children’s reading of English books

The purpose of this study is to develop an appropriate method to measure the difficulty of a particular text or document for effective English reading ability when teachers and parents choose English books for various levels of EFL (English as a foreign language) students at an elementary school in Korea. One major difference between EFL students and those students whose mother tongue is English is the different amount of exposure to English vocabulary. This study has reorganized the difficulty of vocabulary according to the 7th national curriculum. Another major factor is sentence difficulty. To measure sentence difficulty a syntactic complexity formula was utilized. The difficulty of English vocabulary and sentence complexity was multiplied according to the proposed Korean lexile formula. To test the appropriateness of Korean lexile, the students’ comprehension of English books is measured. To this end, comprehension tests were developed for the books and given to 140 students from the third to sixth grades in an elementary school. According to the results, the correlation of students’ comprehension rate turned out to be much higher with Korean lexile than American lexile. This study sets a formula for differentiating reading texts appropriate to Korean learners of English. In addition, this study provides a basis for developing a tool to accurately measure English readability of Korean children learning English.