아시아 EFL 3개국 대학입시 영어읽기지문 코퍼스 비교 분석

A corpus based comparative study on the high-stakes tests in Asian EFL countries: Korea, China, and Vietnam case

Abundant corpus research has been conducted in analyzing the contents of Korean CSAT and related textbooks. Yet, those studies only abound in the Korean context. A comparative study on the EFL CSAT within a similar Asian region has been much scarcer. Thus, this study aims to investigate the detailed contents of the high-stakes tests in Korea, China, and Vietnam based on readability, syntactic complexity, and subject matter by using a corpus. The results showed that the readability level of both FRE and GFI after conducting ANOVA indicated that Korean CSAT has the highest difficulty of readability compared to China and Vietnam. However, on the FKGL measure, a study found no significant readability differences among the three countries. By having a high-difficulty text level on some readability measures, Korean CSAT seemed to contain more syntactic complexities on T-unit complexity ratio in subordination and complex nominals per T-unit in particular structure, and several other measures indicated in this study. All three countries used difficult to more difficult subject matters on their high-stakes test. The results are discussed in terms of implications for readability level, syntactic complexity, and subject matter of the English CSAT among three different EFL countries.