A Corpus-based Analysis of the Linguistic Complexity Levels of the Reading Passages in Three Asian EFL Countries’ College Entrance English Exams

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic complexity levels of the reading passages of the foreign language (English) domain of the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) in Korea and compares them with those in two other Asian EFL countries. For the study, the reading passages of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese college entrance English exams from the 2018 to 2020 academic year were collected and analyzed based on the length, propositional content and organizational characteristics by using a variety of corpus linguistic tools. The Kruskal-Wallis test was administered in order to see if there was a statistically significant difference among the tests. Also, when between-group differences were detected, the Mann-Whitney U post hoc test was conducted to further look into significant differences between the CSAT and the other tests. Overall findings suggest that the reading passages of the CSAT English exam maintained the highest difficulty level among the three Asian EFL countries’ college entrance English exams, with cognitively demanding academically-oriented items, highly advanced vocabulary, complex syntactic structure and low readability. Based on the findings, this research is expected to shed light on the intention of incorporating criterion-referenced English assessment into the CSAT as well as provide pedagogical implications for test developers and education policy makers in Korea.