EBS 및 서울시 중학교 영어듣기시험의 비교 분석

A comparative analysis of Middle School English listening tests developed by EBS and Seoul Secondary English Teachers’ Association

The present study attempted to analyze and compare the overall difficulty and rubric of the Middle School English listening tests, which were developed by the Education Broadcasting System(EBS) and Seoul Secondary English Teachers Association(SETA). The test item analysis showed that as much as 50% of test items were designed to focus on the micro-listening skill to identify detail information. Over half of the test items in the three tests required the test-takers to use bottom-up processing, failing to reflect the listening achievement standards (subskills) of the National Curriculum in a representative manner. As for the coverage of different types of spoken language, over 70% of the listening texts in all the tests were focused only on conversation. Overall, the comparative analysis of the corpus and speech rates indicated that there were fairly significant differences between the two test sets. On the average, the speech rates of the EBS listening test were lower than the other two listening tests developed by SETA. The corpus-based analysis also revealed that the token sizes of listening texts presented in the EBS listening tests turned out to be much smaller than those of the SETA listening tests on the whole. Implications based on the research findings were suggested.