This study examined the reading passages of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) and middle school English textbooks in terms of their readability and lexical difficulty. The readability was measured by using Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index, while their lexical difficulty was measured in terms of STTR (standardized type-token ratio), frequency of tokens per type, and vocabulary frequency levels by using VocabProfile and Oxford WordSmith Tools 7.0. The results showed that there was a gap between the readability of the English textbooks and that of the NAEA conducted from 2012 to 2014, while the readability between the English textbooks and that of the 2015 NAEA reached a comparable level. However, the textbooks from one publisher showed substantively lower readability than those from the other publishers and the NAEA. Secondly, regarding vocabulary frequency levels, the words in 1K and 2K accounted for more than 90% of the textbooks and the NAEA, while the NAEA had a higher STTR and lower frequency of tokens per type than the textbooks. It suggests that the NAEA employed more various words with less repetition than the textbooks. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

The present study examines L2 reading proficiency effects on the relative contribution of vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge to L2 reading comprehension for Korean high school EFL learners. To this end, 200 high school students were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge test, a grammar test, and a reading comprehension test. The participants were divided into three sub-groups by L2 reading ability in order to examine L2 proficiency effects. Multiple regression analyses for the sub-groups indicated the relationships among the three variables as distinctive. The results showed that syntactic knowledge had a predictive power for reading performance in the high reading group, but vocabulary had the same quality in the intermediate reading group. For the low reading group, neither vocabulary nor grammar could significantly account for the L2 reading variance. Theoretical implications and directions for further studies are discussed.

The present study sought to investigate whether Korean learners would benefit from tablet PC-based English learning and how they and their instructors would perceive the relatively new mobile technology as a language learning and teaching tool. To this end, 161 young learners and 57 instructors at private English institutes in several cities in Korea took part in the present study. For three months, the learners received one of two forms of instruction, one based on traditional paper-based materials and the other via tablet PC-based materials. Analyses of the listening and reading tests and of the questionnaire responses, followed by student interviews, indicate that the learners may benefit from tablet PC-based English programs, especially in their reading skills and their learning autonomy. Furthermore, the learners’ beliefs in the effectiveness of tablet PC-based instruction were found to be stronger than among the instructors. Pedagogical implications and future research directions are discussed.