2015 개정 영어과 교육과정의 성취 수준과 대학수학능력 영어 평가 수준의 일관성 문제

Consistency between the targeted achievement levels of the 2015 revised national curriculum of English and the assessment levels of the College Scholastic Ability Test of English in South Korea

This paper aims to investigate the consistency between the achievement levels stated in the national curriculum of English and the national-level English test. The study first analyzed the target levels of the achievement standards and the basic word list included in the 2015 revised national curriculum according to the CEFR levels. Next, it compared them to those of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) of English that students take at the completion of public education in South Korea. The examination of the difficulty levels of the CSAT included the English reading passages from 2016 to 2019 academic years and focused on the text readability. The results indicated that the targeted achievement levels presented in the curriculum gradually increased by school levels, reaching CEFR B2 level in all language skills by completing high school education. In contrast, the English reading section of the CSAT included a significant portion of the passages whose difficulty levels were higher than CEFR B2+. The required word knowledge was also found to be about 7,000- to 8,000- word frequency levels. Based on these findings, this paper discusses factors that contribute to the lack of consistency between the national English curriculum and the test with some relevant implications.