Coh-Metrix를 활용한 한국과 핀란드의 대학입학시험읽기 지문 난이도 비교 연구

A Coh-Metrix analysis of reading passages in the university entrance examination of Korea and Finland

This study investigates the relative difficulty for learners of reading passages in the university entrance examinations of Korea and Finland. For this project, the English reading texts of Korean and Finnish entrance exams conducted in the past five years were assembled as corpora, and analyzed using Coh-Metrix. The findings reveal the following. First, the Finnish entrance exam consists of longer passages with a greater total number of words and sentences than the Korean exam, and focuses on extensive reading while the Korean exam emphasizes intensive reading. Second, the Korean entrance exam has a lower Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) but a higher Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) value than the Finnish exam. This means that although the Korean exam consists of short sentences, they are syntactically complex sentences, which may make it difficult for students to read and understand the passages. Third, there was a significant difference between the Basic and Advanced levels of the Finnish entrance exam, regarding frequency of content words, word length, word count, sentence length, sentence count, FRE, and FKGL. This implies that on Finnish exam, the level of difficulty is adjusted properly by type. Based on the results of this study, the investigators believe it is necessary to include both short and long passages on the Korean CSAT so that it can test a balanced reading comprehension skills of students.