고등학교 영어 교과서, EBS 수능 연계 교재, 대학수학능력시험의 코퍼스기반 난이도 비교 분석

Abstract

As the difficulty level of EBS prep books designed for College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT)has recently been hotly debated, a new version of CSAT (Engish) has been proposed by thegovernment to reflect the nature of criterion-referenced test. At this juncture, the present studyis intended to investigate the extent to which the overall difficulty level of EBS-CSAT prepbooks appropriately reflects the National Curriculum. In order to achieve this goal, the studyconducts a corpus-based analysis of the linguistic difficulty among High School EnglishTextbooks, EBS-CSAT prep books and CSAT (collected from 2010 to 2013). Overall, theresults revealed that the linguistic difficulty levels of EBS-CSAT prep books (which are similarto CSAT in many respects) are much higher than those of High School Textbooks in terms ofvocabulary, syntactic complexity, coherence, and readability. In order to normalize the level ofdifficulty, EBS prep books are to be developed through more rigorous procedures that abideby the National Curriculum. Finally, employing an item-pool system based on textbooks isproposed as a viable approach to the aforementioned EBS-CSAT issue.