초·중·고등학교 영어 읽기지문의 난이도와 연계성분석 연구

The purpose of the present study is to explore the difficulty and continuity analysis of the English reading passages in the elementary, middle and high school English textbooks of the 2015 Revised National Curriculum. The present study compared the continuity of 5th grade elementary school to 1st year high school English textbooks between grades. For this analysis, 60 English textbooks from elementary to high school were analyzed according to with eight indices from Coh-Metrix, which measured the quantifiable aspects of passages (i.e., the number of words, number of sentences, and average length of a single sentence) and the readability of the target reading texts. As a result of analyzing the three quantifiable elements of learning, it was found that most of the textbooks showed a significant difference and increased the amount of written input by grade from the 5th grade of elementary school to the 1st grade of high school. Additionally, the indicators corresponding to lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and readability showed that the textbooks for the higher grades had more complicated sentence structures and high readability scores. In conclusion, the large difference in difficulty of the English textbooks between grades, from elementary school to middle school and from the third grade of middle school to the first grade of high school, has implications for future curriculum and textbook development.