한국 대입영어시험 어휘의 코퍼스 분석

A Corpus-based Analysis of the Vocabulary Used in the CSAT English Exam and Two Analogous Tests

This study is a corpus-based analysis of the English vocabulary used in the English exams of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and its two analogous tests (i.e., the Mock CSAT and the Achievement Test), and it aims to determine the vocabulary levels of the three types of English exams and evaluate their appropriateness as tests to measure prospective college students' English proficiency for higher education, an issue left mostly untouched in all previous studies. To achieve this goal, a corpus of college entrance English exams has been built from the English exams of the three related nationwide tests administered for six years from 2004 to 2009 and been analyzed and compared in several different ways. The results show that the three types of English exams are similar in virtually all aspects, including vocabulary size and vocabulary difficulty level, suggesting that their yearly difficulty levels have been maintained quite consistently. Considering the low lexical coverage of college-level academic vocabulary, however, it is doubtful whether Korean CSAT English exams can be legitimately used to give an accurate and objective evaluation of prospective college students' English proficiency, as part of 'college scholastic ability', required for studies at college.