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This corpus-driven research aims to examine the intra-grade continuity of reading passages within high school English mock exams, specifically the national academic achievement tests for seniors in 2023. These tests were conducted quarterly by four regional educational offices: Seoul in March, Incheon in April, Gyeonggi Province in July, and Seoul in October. A corpus of 100 reading passages, 25 from each test, was analyzed via a range of Coh-Metrix measures, including word features, lexical diversity, connectives, readability, referential cohesion, syntactic complexity, semantic cohesion, and so on. These Coh-metrix results demonstrated that there was no compelling evidence to support strong intra-grade continuity, highlighting the necessity for meticulous calibration of text difficulty, which should incrementally escalate with successive test administrations. The analysis of basic metrics, lexical frequency and diversity, syntactic complexity, and readability revealed no consistent trends across test administrations. Additionally, lexical attributes such as concreteness, familiarity, imagery, and age of acquisition did not show significant continuity. Moreover, the analysis of syntactic complexity also showed no consistent pattern. The current inconsistency in text difficulty suggests that students may not be receiving the progressive challenge needed to develop their reading comprehension skills effectively. Drawing upon these findings, theoretical and pedagogical implications are elucidated.
Lee et al. (Sun,) studied this question.