Earticle

The purpose of this study is to examine how Korean EFL learners perceive foreigner-directed speech (FDS) and whether institutional background and text difficulty influence such perceptions. Although previous studies have often documented the acoustic characteristics of FDS, fewer studies have explored how learners evaluate FDS across multiple perceptual dimensions or how other factors may moderate these evaluations. To address this issue, sixty undergraduate students from 2- and 4-year institutions completed a rating task in which they evaluated casual speech and FDS produced from two texts differing in difficulty, The North Wind and the Sun and Please Call Stella. Participants rated each stimulus in terms of friendliness, confidence, naturalness, and politeness, and the data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. The results indicate that FDS was perceived as friendlier and more polite, but less confident and less natural than casual speech. Significant interaction effects revealed that the impact of speaking style was greater for higher cognitive demand and among 2-year students. These findings suggest that perceptions of FDS are shaped not only by speaking style but also by institutional background and text difficulty.

While text difficulty is one of the critical considerations in developing and selecting materials for interpreter training, its assessment is a challenging task due to the complexities involved in analyzing a large number of text characteristics. The recent developments in automated text analysis methods and tools are expected to alleviate the burden of individual teachers and students assessing source text difficulty by aiding their decision making process with the immediate provision of data on the objective and quantifiable text dimensions. This study presents three cases of applying automated assessment of source text difficulty based on the five Text Easability Principal Component Scores provided by Coh-Metrix, a widely-used automated tool for multilevel analyses of text characteristics. For the purpose of the study, source texts used for interpreter training in Korea and China were sampled to conduct text difficulty assessment with Coh-Metrix measures and its visualization tool. The study discusses the potential benefits of automated analysis of multidimensional text difficulty for selecting the appropriate materials for effective interpreter training.

This paper attempts to investigate the relationship between the source text difficulty and the quality of machine translation output. We examined the results of human evaluation of the Korean-English statutory translation by Google Translate and the source text difficulty measured in terms of lexical and terminological difficulty and syntactic complexity. The translations of two different statutes revealed varying correlation patterns examined in terms of fluency, accuracy, terminology and others. The results demonstrate that the two source texts’ syntactic complexity had a negative correlation with the machine translation quality evaluation. In other words, Google Translate was found to be weak at translating long and syntactically complex sentences. On the other hand, lexical and terminological difficulty did not have any correlation with the results of human evaluation despite the fact that statutes contain a lot of difficult words. Overall, the source text difficulty had a strong negative correlation with the human evaluation results, which was generally supported by the evaluators’ comments on fluency and accuracy errors.

This study examines the difficulty of reading text in elementary school English textbooks. Four elementary school English textbook series published by three publishers were evaluated by Word Critical Factor (WCF). WCF considers cognitive demands for word recognition; it assesses the match of linguistic content in the text with the phonetically regular and high-frequency words that are associated with particular stages of reading development. For the analysis, all of the words that appeared in the reading and writing sections from four elementary school English textbooks were analyzed by two criteria, that is, the ratio of high frequency words and phonetically regular words among 100 running words, and the number of unique words in each textbook. The results showed that all four textbooks’ difficulty levels were very high considering the learner’s reading ability. This was due to the textbooks having a low repetition of words and also the complicated vowel patterns that were above the reading abilities of students. All of these factors combined are what have caused the difficulties presented in English textbooks. In conclusion, although the reading text introduces a variety of genres and activities for the development of reading skills, most reading text could not assist the reader’s cognitive processing.

Elementary School Teachers’ Perspectives toward the Reading Materials in an Extensive Reading Program Ji-Hyun Byun (Hannam University) The purpose of this research is to explore the perceptions of elementary school teachers toward the reading materials that are likely to be offered in the extensive reading program. A total of twenty elementary school teachers who were undergoing a professional development program participated in the study. They were situated in a print-affluent classroom replete with approximately 1,100 English-language reading materials including graded readers, young-adult books, and children’s books. In the program, the teachers were encouraged to check out any book related to their interests and proficiency levels. Data were collected from multiple sources to enhance the credibility of the study: observation with field notes, learner diaries, and interviews. The findings of the study indicated that the participating teachers showed great fondness for graded readers and perceived them to be appropriate reading materials for their elementary school students. The teachers' positive attitudes toward graded readers originated from these elements: simplified language and interesting content. They also believed that reading such books can be a cornerstone in instilling confidence in learners at elementary schools. Unlike the great popularity of graded readers, other reading materials including young-adult books, best sellers, magazines, and newspapers received less attention mainly due to colloquial language and a high level of text-difficulty.

This paper is a case study of the strategic behaviors of younger Korean students. Three Korean elementary students are examined in this study. An interview was used to collect retrospective verbal data on listening processes as well as listening strategies, and a listening strategy questionnaire was used to gather additional information regarding general listening strategic behaviors. A coded strategy report was tabulated, and the mean and percentage were used to render a strategy profile for each participant. The results of this study revealed that the participants, in most case, used all four groups of strategies: cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and affective strategies. However, they differed in their use of strategies within each group of strategies as well as in how often they used each type of strategies. The differences in the strategic behaviors were closely related to listening proficiency level, text difficulty and listening situation. A highly proficient participant used more strategies compared to less proficient participants. The highly proficient participant typically used top-down strategies more often. In contrast, the less proficient participants used bottom-up strategies more often. They typically relied heavily on familiar words and translation when they listened to a more difficult text. Cognitive strategies were reported the most in the interview and compensation strategies were marked as highest in the LSQ.

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This study aims to investigate the text difficulty of the reading materials of Korean middle school English textbooks with Coh-Metrix, a software developed by the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis to analyze the linguistic and psycholinguistic features of English text and textbooks with a wide range of indices on cohesion and language. In this study, the textbook corpus consisted of the text files extracted from 13 English textbooks. These files were used for analyzing the text difficulty among grades with Coh-Metrix. The Coh-Metrix indices selected for this study contained basic counts, word frequency, word features, lexical diversity, pronouns, connectives, readability, syntax complexity, syntax similarity, reference cohesion, semantic cohesion, and situation model measures. The results showed that there were significant differences among grades for basic counts, word features, first pronouns, causal and temporal connectives, readability, reference and semantic cohesion, the number of words before main verbs, syntactic similarity, and situation model measures. The differences among grades, however, were not significant for word frequency, lexical diversity, second and third person pronouns, additive connectives, and NP density measures. The findings have educational implications for textbook design and language learning for English learners.

본 연구의 목적은 성인 독자들이 덩이글을 읽을 때, 글의 난이도와 독자들의 개인차 특성이 실시간 안구운동에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 알아보는 것이다. 실험 참여자들은 먼저 주어진 덩이글을 읽고 각 글의 핵심 주제를 묻는 질문에 답하였다. 그 후, 언어 능력, 단기 및 작업 기억 능력, 그리고 집행통제 능력을 측정할 수 있는 일련의 개인차 과제들을 수행하였다. 본 연구의 결과를 간단히 정리하면, 첫째, 글의 난이도는 읽기 속도에 부적인 영향을 주었다. 둘째, 독자들의 언어 및 인지 능력의 개인차가 글을 읽는 속도에 영향을 미쳤다. 즉, 언어능력이 높을수록, 단기 및 작업 기억의 용량이 클수록 글을 읽는 속도가 빨랐다. 그리고 글의 난이도와 개인차 변수 사이의 상호작용도 나타났는데, 언어 능력이 좋고, 작업 기억 용량이 클수록 읽기 속도에 대한 글의 난이도의 효과가 컸다 흥미롭게도 언어 능력이 좋고 작업 기억 용량이 큰 사람이 그렇지 않은 사람에 비해 쉬운 글을 읽는 속도가 훨씬 빨랐다. 하지만 이러한 능력들은 어려운 글을 읽는 속도에는 영향을 주지 않았다. 본 연구를 통해 얻은 결과와 관련된 이론적, 방법론적 쟁점들이 논의되었다.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how text difficulty and readers’ individual differences in cognitive abilities affect eye movements while reading. Participants were asked to read given texts and to respond a question for each text. They were also administrated a battery of individual-difference tasks measuring abilities of language, short-term/working memory capacity, and executive control. The main findings were as follows. First, text difficulty negatively influenced on reading speed. Second, individual differences in language and cognitive abilities affected reading speed. Specifically, higher language ability and bigger capacity of short-term/working memory were associated with faster reading speed. Finally, interaction effects between text difficulty and individual differences were emerged such that those who had better language skills and bigger working memory size read easy texts faster than those who had not did. However, such abilities did not have effects on reading speed of difficult texts. Theoretical and methodological issues on the current findings were discussed.

『마의상법』은 중국에서 편찬한 관상서이다. 이 책은 실용성이 높아 우리나라에서도 조선 시대에 필사본과 영인본이 많이 나돌았고, 지금은 국내에 번역본이 7종이나 출간되어 있다. 이 책이 많이 알려진 이유는 다른 관상서와 달리 오관(귀, 눈썹, 눈, 코, 입)의 형태별 특징에 대해 그림과 함께 자세하게 설명해놓았기 때문이다. 그래서 관상 실전에 필요한 실용성으로 서의 가치가 높았다. 관상에 관심 있는 사람들에게는 『마의상법』 이 필독서나 마찬가지이다. 그런데 『마의상법』의 번역문을 검토해보면 유독 ‘오관’ 설명 부분에서 오역이 많이 나타난다. 중국, 대만의 백화 번역서도 마찬가지로 오역이 많았다. 그래서 이 논문에서는 기존의 번역문 을 분석하여 관상서 번역의 특수성과 번역 난점을 알아보고, 오류 분석 방법을 통해 올바른 번역 대안을 제시하였다. 『마의상법』의 ‘오관’ 부분은 대부분 동물의 형상에 비유하여 설명하였다. 그리고 칠언절구 시의 형식으로 표현하였고 압운법까지 사용하였다. 그러다 보니 역자는 문맥 의미에 의존한 번역조차도 어려울 수밖에 없다. 또 다른 이유로는 이 ‘오관’ 부분의 설명과 그림이 있는 관상 고서는 『마의상법』과 『상리형진』 두 권뿐이라는 점이다. 번역에 참고할 다른 관상서가 없다. 현대 관상서도 이 두 권의 고전 해석을 벗어나서 설명하기는 어렵다. 역자의 오역 원인을 분 석한 결과, ① 문장에서 설명의 대상이 되는 단어, 즉 주어를 찾지 못해서 생긴 오역, ② 동물 의 형상 특징을 묘사한 관상학적 지식의 부족으로 생긴 오역, ③ 문맥 의미와 관상 지식이 아닌 어휘나 통사구조에 얽매여 생긴 오역 등이 있었다. 이러한 오역 원인과 번역과정 분석은 『신상전편』, 『상리형진』 등 다른 관상 고서의 번역에 도움을 제공할 것으로 본다.

『MaUiSangBeob(麻衣相法)』 is the book of physiognomy which was compiled in China. For the book is very practical, many handwriting copies and photoprint copies were circulated in the Joseon Dynasty period in our history. Now, seven kinds of Korean translated versions of 『MaUiSangBeob』 ere published in Korea. On the other hand, according to the close examination of many translations of the book especially to the explanation part of 'the five sensory organs(五官)' shows many mistranslation. The Chinese colloquial translation book also shows many mistranslation. 'The five sensory organs' are explained by analogy the form of animals, and described them in a type of system of chinese poems by four lines‒each line has seven words(七言絶句)–and rhymes. As a result, translators have difficulties to understand the original fully. Another reason to misunderstand the orignal text is that there are only two old books to explain the five sensory organs in detail with pictures, which is‒『MaUiSangBeob』 and 『SangRiHyungJin(相理衡眞)』. There are no other books about the physiognomy except them. And even in modern books of the physiognomy, it is hard to explain without the classic interpretation of this two old books‒『MaUiSangBeob』 and 『SangRiHyungJin』. Looking at the cause of the wrong translation of the translator, first, it is a misinterpretation caused by not finding the word or subject to be explained in the sentence. Second, it is a misinterpretation caused by a lack of physiognomic knowledges describing the characteristics of animal shapes, and third, it is a misinterpretation caused by vocabulary or syntactic structure, not contextual meaning and physiognomic knowledge.

Readability is an important issue in finding the right fit between students’ reading ability and text difficulty. The purpose of this study is to analyze reading texts from the five high school English textbooks with the same number of chapters as regards their readability and to examine whether each chapter of the texts would be placed in order of difficulty. The readability was calculated with the well-known readability formulas including the Flesch-Kincaid Readability, the Gunning Fog formula, and the Coh-Metrix tool. Coh-Metrix was developed to provide a wide range of indices for the characteristics of texts on multiple levels of analysis. It is supposed to better understand differences between texts beyond traditional readability measures. This study tried to get the answer of the question: Is there, according to these readability formulas and Coh-Metrix indices, an increase in order of the difficulty throughout the whole units of the textbooks? It has been found that the difficulty changes without principle. Based on this, the suggestion is that English textbooks writers and teachers should recognize readability is the most important consideration in writing or selecting English textbooks. (Wonkwang University)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the syntactic text variables related to the item difficulties of CSAT through the indices in the Coh-metrix, the computational tool, using the 299 reading texts from the 2014 to 2018 CSAT and mock CSAT. The 299 texts of CSAT and mock CSAT from The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation were made into corpora and the percentage of correct answers were obtained from EBSi website. These texts were analyzed by Coh-Metrix, a linguistic computational program, and then, the correlation analysis was conducted to find out what syntactic text variables have influence on the item difficulties. The results of this study are as follows. First, the more sentences with syntactic similarity in the passage, and the longer the distance between new words, the higher percentage of correct answers. Second, frequencies of negative expression was negatively correlated with the percentage of correct answers. Although there are many variables having an effect on the item difficulty and the rate of the correct answer, the objective figures of the text variables offered by linguistic devices is expected to be useful in successful predicting the item difficulty of the reading part in CSAT.

This study examines changes in the text difficulty of 10th-grade English textbook passages across six South Korean curricula: the 5th, 6th, 7th, 2007 Revised, 2015 Revised, and 2022 Revised Curricula. In South Korea, textbooks are developed in accordance with national curriculum guidelines and their reading passages often function as the primary source of written English input. As such, they provide a valuable lens through which to examine policy-driven shifts in instructional materials. Using 18 textbooks, the researchers analyzed the main reading sections across four domains of text difficulty: word count, readability, lexical complexity (diversity and sophistication), and syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit and clause). The results show that the 5th and 6th Curricula had similar text difficulty profiles, while the 7th featured shorter passages but higher lexical diversity. The 2007 Revised occupied a middle range across most measures. Text difficulty rose significantly in the 2015 revision and again in the 2022 revision, when readability increased, vocabulary became more varied and less frequent, and both clauses and T-units lengthened. The 2022 revision demonstrated the highest overall difficulty, aligned with its explicit standards emphasizing diverse vocabulary and complex structures. Overall, the findings highlight the influence of curriculum policy on linguistic demands and underscore the need for careful calibration of text difficulty in future reforms.

This study aims to investigate whether text difficulty has an effect on the use of metacognition-driven reading strategy clusters when they read the online reading materials in English. The participants were sixty two university students in Korea. They were asked to read two online texts with two different text difficulties and then answer a questionnaire called Metacognition-driven Reading Strategy Cluster Use Questionnaire, asking which reading strategies they used simultaneously along with a certain metacognitive reading strategy. The results show that they use more metacognition-driven reading strategy clusters when reading the online text with lower text difficulty than the text with higher text difficulty. Furthermore, the mean difference between the means of metacognition-driven reading strategy cluster use according to the text difficulty is also significantly different. It reveals that the text difficulty has an effect on the use of metacognition-driven reading strategy clusters used by Korean university students when they read the online reading texts in English. Therefore, in English reading class, the university students should be provided the reading materials with the proper text difficulty in order to make the students’ metacognition be more active and use the other reading strategies more actively.

Since STs in interpreter education are commonly selected by teachers, instructors must also determine the right level of the difficulty of STs for classwork and exams in order to ensure the appropriateness of the materials. However, interpreting teachers tend to disagree on the optimal level of difficulty of a given ST, resulting in less reliable assessment results. This study, therefore, addressed two questions related to the subjective determination of ST difficulty by interpreting teachers: 1) how consistent are their assessments with one another?; and 2) what are the textual properties related to their subjective judgments of ST difficulty? 15 interpreting teachers from postgraduate English-Korean interpreting programs rated the difficulty of five English STs and the scores they assigned were compared. Very low inter-rater consistency is found in the subjective judgment of ST difficulty. On the other hand, the participants' difficulty assessment of the STs, on the basis of the mean values of their scores, showed significant correlations with the average length of T-unit, Flesch Reading Ease Score and type-to-token ratio of the STs. Thus, subjective evaluating of vocabulary- and sentence-related difficulty should be replaced by these quantifiable indicators.

The current study examines the text difficulty of English listening materials in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). It classifies the forms of spoken language into two categories, dialogues and monologues, and two testing types, the 2014-2017 norm-referenced testing and the 2018-2021 criterion-referenced testing. The interconnection between the two testing types and the two forms of spoken language has not been much researched. Therefore, this study could shed light on whether the text difficulty of different forms of spoken language (dialogues and monologues) changed in the CSAT after the testing type changed. For the study, the corpus consists of 149 listening texts from the scripts of the 2014 to 2021 CSAT. Coh-Metrix is adopted as the textual assessment tool to analyze descriptive measures, readability, and text easability. These Coh-Metrix indices are all directly related to the text difficulty. The comparison between the two testing types identifies that dialogues, unlike monologues, tend to change in the text difficulty. The comparison between the two forms of spoken language shows that monologues tend to be more difficult than dialogues in both norm- and criterion-referenced testing. Implications of this research for classroom and curriculum development are also discussed.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of text difficulty and reading comprehension ability on English summary writing of Korean EFL readers. Forty-four university freshmen participated in this study, in which they were asked to read two expository English texts and write a summary in English for each source text. Their summaries were analyzed in terms of the content idea units, idea units at different importance levels, accuracy, paraphrase and integration, and intrusion. The results showed that higher-level readers were able to identify the important information and overall content ideas of the source text better than lower-level ones. The more proficient readers were also more skillful at integrating the ideas of the original text and reproducing them in their own words than the less proficient readers. Moreover, regardless of the reading comprehension level, there were less inaccurate statements in the easier text summarization in both groups. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.

The current study investigates the degree of text difficulty in CSAT English reading passages between 2015-2017 norm- and 2018-2020 criterion-referenced testing, and among question types including understanding general ideas, details, and logical relation. In order to compare the text difficulty, the corpus was constructed from 150 reading passages in the 2015-2020 CSAT. Coh-Metrix and professional Lexile analyzer analyzed a basic count, readability levels, and text easability levels. Concerning the comparison between two testing types, the sentence length is significantly different in understanding details, and the Coh-Metrix L2 readability and Lexile measure indicate significant differences only in understanding logical relation. Considering the comparison among the three question types, sentence length is significantly different among the three question types in both testing types. The criterion-referenced testing shows a clear difference among the three question types in all indices of readability levels while the norm-referenced testing does not show any obvious distinction among the question types in any index. The norm- and criterion-referenced testing types show different trends of text easability across the three question types. Overall, the differences between the two testing types do not seem clear without classifying reading passages into the three different question types. The pedagogical implications are included.