Building a Wordlist from 2006-2021 Mock and Official College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT) Uncovered in the 2022 Revised National Curriculum of English

Building a Wordlist from 2006-2021 Mock and Official College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT) Uncovered in the 2022 Revised National Curriculum of English

This study endeavors to develop a Korean High School English Test (KHET) wordlist that is featured in actual high-stakes exams but not covered by the 2022 revised national curriculum of English (RNCE) wordlist. The KHET corpus consists of reading passages across 6,086 test items from official and mock College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT) administered over an expansive 16-year period, spanning 2006 to 2021. This KHET corpus, aggregating to 809,354 tokens, 27,514 types, and 2,991 word families, is categorized based on different question types and their lexical distribution in comparison with the 2022 RNCE wordlist. The findings reveal that the significant dominance of fill-in-the-blank (21.03%), identifying main idea (9.82%), and long reading comprehension (8.65%) question types necessitates a robust contextual vocabulary knowledge in order to excel on the exam. Moreover, the study gauges the alignment of vocabulary within the KHET corpus against the 2022 RNCE wordlist and, with a frequency range threshold set at 3, a total of 5,308 vocabulary items, recurrent across different question types, were identified. Among these, there was a distinct subset of 516 words aligned with CEFR levels C1 and C2, and the Academic Word List. By unveiling previously overshadowed vocabulary items, this study guides future pedagogical resources equipping students not merely for the CSAT but also for broader academic contexts.