Earticle

Hedges pose challenges for EFL learners, yet empirical research on examining learners’ sensitivity to the semantic scope and categorial constraints remain limited. This pilot study investigated Chinese EFL learners’ interpretation of six textbookbased hedges, including typically, strictly speaking, technically, sort of, loosely speaking, and in that, in combination with typical and peripheral category members. A total of 140 undergraduates completed 24 judgment items, and their responses were analyzed using Rasch modeling to determine item difficulty. The analysis revealed that most learners failed to notice the scope-delimiting and category-conditioning function of hedges, often prioritizing propositional content over hedge-related cues. Substantial variability in item difficulty emer- ged, with sort of and loosely speaking posing the greatest challenges, whereas typically and technically were comparatively easy. In addition, peripheral category members were more challenging than typical ones, a pattern consistent with prototype theory and fuzzy category boundaries. The findings highlight the need for explicit instruction, particularly consciousness -raising activities and clear explanation combined with practice on hedge use and category membership.

This study investigated inter-passage connectivity within a chapter of High school English textbooks in the four linguistic sections?listening, speaking, reading, and writing?in terms of semantic intertextuality and consistency of text difficulty. These two aspects of text such as descriptives (sentence count, word count and sentence length) and readability were investigated by the two recent computational linguistic tools, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Coh-Metrix. The results from LSA revealed that texts in each linguistic section had a weak semantic intertextuality in a chapter except for the writing section. Through Coh-Metrix analysis, passages in the entire linguistic sections were found to be relatively consistent on sentence length but had high variations in sentence count and word count. Overall the variations appear to differ depending on linguistic section and textbook. Another finding from Coh-Metrix analysis is that the textbooks showed different levels of text difficulty on a few measures even though their target learners are the same 9th grade high school students. This research is limited to partial indices of LSA and Coh-Metrix and quantitative representation of the passages. Pedagogical implications are suggested based on the findings from this study.

본고는 글의 어려움의 정도를 나타내는 난도가 언어적인 방식과 언어적 도구로써 파악되고 분석될 수 있어야 한다는 전제 아래, 글 난도를 결정하는 요인 중 하나인 의미의 복잡성에 주목하여 이를 살피기 위한 언어적 분석 기준을 제시하고 그에 따라 텍스트를 실제로 분석하여 난도의 문제를 논의해 보고자 한다. 이를 위해 LCT(Legitimation Code Theory)의 ‘의미 밀도’ 개념에 주목하여 어휘 층위에서 글의 난도를 파악할 수 있는 방법을 제시하였다. 이는 난도 분석 방안을 언어적으로 구체화하려는 일환으로, 난도와 관련한 양적 분석의 한계를 보완하고 질적 분석의 효과성을 강화하는 한편, 독자(학습자)의 개념적 부하를 예측함으로써 독자 요인까지 언어적 요소로 포괄하여 난도를 분석할 수 있다는 이점을 지닌다.

Under the premise that text difficulty should be analyzed using a linguistic method and linguistic tool, this paper pays attention to the complexity of meaning, one of the factors that determine text difficulty, and presents linguistic analysis criteria to examine it, and analyzes text accordingly. To this end, a method for analyzing text difficulty at the lexical level was presented with the concept of 'semantic density' of LCT. This makes it possible to supplement the limitations of quantitative analysis related to text difficulty, strengthen the effectiveness of qualitative analysis, and predict the conceptual load of readers(learners), thereby providing the advantage of being able to analyze text difficulty by including reader factors as linguistic factors.