수능영어 읽기 지문에 대한 통시적 Coh-Metrix 분석

A Diachronic Analysis of English KSAT Reading Passages

The purpose of this study is to analyse the reading passages of Korean Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT) diachronically. To this end, a reading passage corpus is constructed based on the KSAT reading passages from 1994 academic year to 2017 academic year. The passages are analysed using Coh-Metrix which shows both statistical complexity of word and readability on the one hand and statistical complexity of sentence and semantic cohesion on the other. The passages are divided into three diachronic stages: 1990s between 1994 and 2000 academic year, 2000s between 2001 and 2010 academic year, and 2010s between 2011 and 2017 academic year. All the indices show a tendency that passages in 1990s stick to the principles of the KSAT introductory principles, but 2000s the difficulty level starts to fluctuate into more difficult direction and 2010s it continues to be from difficult to easy depending on the government intervention and the introductory of using EBS KSAT passages in the exam. It is concluded that KSAT has withered losing its functioning principles, and it has been long overdue calls for changing the exam.