코메트릭스(Coh-Metrix)를 활용한 공무원 7급과 9급 영어 시험 지문 분석

Analyzing reading passages in the English tests for civil servants with Coh-Metrix: Focusing on lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, and readability.

This current study aimed at examining the differences between the reading passages used in the English tests for 7 th grade and 9 th grade civil servants in terms of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, cohesive patterns, and readability. Additionally, the correlations were explored among the 14 indices used in the analysis. The reading passages from three-consecutive years (’14-16) of English tests for prospective civil servants were extracted, compiled into corpora, and analyzed using Coh-Metrix to examine the difficulty of the reading demands of civil servant tests. The results demonstrated that there were no statistically significant differences across all 14 variables between the reading passages extracted from the English test for 7 th and 9 th grade civil servants, respectively. It was found out, however, that there existed some significant positive and negative correlations among the comparable variables. The current study implied that test developers need to carefully calibrate the text difficulty between two different levels of civil servant tests so that each test can be used as a legitimate and fair measurement tool to differentiate test-takers by their selected grade. The implications and the limitations of the current study were also provided.