수능 영어 독해 지문의 언어적 복잡성에 관한 연구

A corpus-based analysis of the linguistic complexity levels of reading passages in the Korean college entrance examination

The study examined the linguistic complexity levels of reading passages in the College Entrance English Examination (CEEE) and compared them with those in English II and the Scholastic Ability Test (SAT). Reading passages from the three most recently administered papers of the CEEE, two randomly selected English II textbooks, three English papers of the SAT were compiled into corpora and analyzed by VocabProfile and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer to assess their lexical and grammatical complexity levels. VocabProfile analyses indicated that the lexical level of the CEEE was slightly higher than that of the textbooks but considerably lower than that of the SAT. To reach 98% coverage, 4,859, 3,918, and 7,814 word families were required for the CEEE, English II, and the SAT corpus, respectively. In addition, the grammatical complexity level of the CEEE was found to be slightly higher than that of English II but as high as that of the SAT. These findings suggest that the linguistic complexity of reading passages in the CEEE is fairly demanding and can pose a considerable burden on those taking the CEEE. Implications of the findings and future directions for research are suggested. (190 words)