공무원 영어시험의 어휘 부담에 관한 연구

A study on the vocabulary demands of English tests for prospective civil servants

The study aimed at addressing two questions: (1) What are the vocabulary demands of English tests for prospective ninth-level, seventh-level civil servants, and police officers?; and (2) How consistent and uniformed has the vocabulary levels of such tests been over the years? Texts from three-consecutive-years-examination papers (2014, 2015, and 2016) were compiled into corpora and analyzed using VocabProfile to find out the vocabulary demands of the public servant examinations. On average, ninth-level civil servants’ English exams were found to use 2,139 tokens, and seventh-level exams used 2,114 tokens, while police officers’ exam used 1,409 tokens. In order to reach 95% text coverage, test takers were required to know 3,882, 3,479, and 2,890 word families for ninth-level civil servants’, seventh-level civil servants’, and police officers’ exams, respectively. Additionally, to reach 98% text coverage, they should obtain substantially higher knowledge of word families which were found to be the case for 7,497, 6,219, and 5,366 for ninth-level, seventh-level civil servants, and police officers, respectively. The results showed that inconsistency was found in the vocabulary levels for each test across three consecutive years. It was also suggested that there was no clear distinction found in the levels of vocabulary between ninth-level and seventh-level civil servants’ tests, which might be a factor compromising the validity of the high-stakes tests to some extent. The implications of the findings are discussed.