코메트릭스(Coh-Metrix)를 활용한 2015 개정 고등학교 1학년 영어 교과서 읽기 자료의 난이도 분석

This study examines the difficulty levels of the reading materials in eleven High School English textbooks for the 1st year students. To achieve the purpose, a corpus of 92 unicode text files, collected from every unit of the textbooks, was made. Coh-Metrix, an automated web-based software tool designed to measure and evaluate diverse linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects in texts, was applied to investigate the sequences of the reading text difficulties among the units of each textbook. The measured value of each unit was analyzed according to five aspects and ten indices: the basic counts (the number of words, the number of words in each sentence), lexical items (the frequency of content words, lexical diversity), syntactic complexity (the number of words before main verb, the number of modifiers per noun phrase), cohesion (referential cohesion, semantic cohesion), and readability (FRE, FKGL). The finding shows that there were no systematic sequences of the reading text difficulties among the units in all the eleven English textbooks, and it does not correspond to the textbook development guideline of Education Ministry. These results suggest that more systematic and standardized criterion should be reflected to the development of English textbooks and reconstruction of the contents needs to be done by teachers to supplement the incomplete content organization.