2019 대수능 최고 난이도 문항들에서 지문의 텍스트 통일성이 문항난이도에 미치는 영향

Abstract

This study was motivated by the notorious difficulty of the English section of the 2019 College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT). While there have been a large number of studies examining what factors determine the difficulty of ESL reading questions, text coherence has been paid little attention due to the highly linguistic orientation of the language testing field. It was generally agreed in many studies that text itself does not bear a direct relationship with its coherence. Instead, the coherence reflects the reader’s mental representation of the text elicited from it. During the process of drawing the mental representation, the reader both depends on the information explicitly presented in the text and make necessary inferences to fill in the missing parts that he or she failed to discover from the text. In order to explore the influence of text coherence on the difficulty of the reading questions, this study analyzed the most difficult five questions of the English section of the 2019 CSAT using the text analysis paradigm of Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory and attempted to identify whether there are any elements to interfere with the drawing of the mental representation and whether the interrupting elements could lead to the low correct response rate. The analyses demonstrated that the texts for all five questions include some structural elements that might lead many test-takers to trouble in drawing the mental representation and, consequently, making correct answers.