An Analysis of the Continuity of the Listening Scripts of Middle School English Textbooks with Coh-Metrix

This study aims to analyze the linguistic continuity of the listening passages of middle school English textbooks revised by the 2015 National Curriculum with Coh-Metrix, a computer system designed to analyze various psycholinguistic features of text corpora. Specifically, a total of 310 listening scripts were constructed to examine the continuity among three grades for 23 Coh-Metrix measures. The measures selected for this study included basic counts (the number of words, the number of sentences, word length, sentence length), word frequency, word features (imageability, concreteness, age of acquisition), lexical diversity (type-token ratio), personal pronouns, connectives (causal connectives, additive connectives, temporal connectives), readability scores (Flesch Reading Ease score, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level), syntactic complexity, referential cohesion, and semantic cohesion. The results showed that the continuity was appropriately established for the number of words and sentences, sentence length, additive connectives, words before main verbs, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and word features. It, however, was not reflected for word length, word frequency, lexical diversity, noun phrase density, semantic and reference cohesion, causal and temporal connectives, pronouns, and Flesch Reading Ease score. The findings provide several pedagogical implications for the educational policy of National Curriculum and the development of English language teaching materials.