Since the introduction of criterion-referenced evaluation into the English Section of the 2018 College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT), it has become more important than ever to maintain the same level of its difficulty each year. This study was designed to examine whether 2017 and 2018 CSAT reading passages do not differ in terms of text difficulty. Both unidimensional and multidimensional indices Coh-Metrix (Version 3.0) provides were used in this study. Descriptive indices involved the respective count and length of sentences and words. As unidimensional indices, the Coh-Metrix L2 Readability score as well as the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores was measured. Indices for text easibility at different discourse levels (the surface structure, the textbase, the situation model, and the genre and rhetorical structure) were also included. Results showed that there were no significant differences between 2017 and 2018 passages. Compared with other easibility components (narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, and deep cohesion), referential cohesion was rather low in both 2017 and 2018. Some pedagogical implications are also provided.

The purpose of this study is to investigate in-depth high school students’ strategy use in reading English texts of College Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT). This study employed a think-aloud method to look into the reading process by task types and by reading proficiency. Six high school students, three high-level and three low-level readers, were asked to perform reading tasks of three types, ‘finding a theme’, ‘filling the gap’, ‘finding an irrelevant sentence & inserting a sentence’, thinking out loud after training. The results are as follows. First, the participants used varied types of reading strategies regardless of top-down/bottom-up. ‘Guessing from the context’ and ‘paraphrasing in L1’, were most frequently used, and ‘using schema’ and ‘sensing the logical organization’ were least used.’ Second, different strategy use patterns were shown by task types: Far more strategies were used in ‘finding a theme’ than the others, especially, attending to keyword. Third, the high-level readers employed more reading strategies than the low-level counterparts. Furthermore, the strategy use pattern was very different between groups: The low-level readers seldom used ‘checking discourse markers,’ ‘synthesizing information,’ and ‘questioning’ that the high level readers commonly used.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between prosody and reading comprehension of elementary school students in Korea. To achieve the purpose of the study, 114 fifth and sixth graders were selected from three schools of Seoul city and Gyeonggi province, and their prosody, word recognition and comprehension were assessed. In order to measure their prosody, students were asked to read a reading text orally for one minute, and the teacher checked their reading rate, decoding accuracy, and prosody. Students’ prosody was measured through Clay and Imlach’s (1971) method. The results of this study showed that while most students gained higher score in word recognition and reading rate, their prosodic features was found comparatively weak. It also revealed a correlation between the three sub-categories of prosody and reading comprehension. Based on the results of this study, it could be concluded that prosodic reading features of Korean EFL students have co-relations with comprehension, even if their prosodic feature is weak. Finally some ideas for enhancing prosody in L2 students’ reading instruction were suggested.

This study aims at investigating Korean high school students’ reading and writing relations in English with a focus on analysis of effects of reading journal writing which integrates reading and writing. Three groups (reading, writing, reading journal writing) had different treatments for 8 weeks. The results revealed that the reading journal writing group had the highest post-test writing scores compared with the two other groups. This group’s scores were statistically significant different from the reading group’s. The same results were also found in the higher-level group. As for the lower-level group, however, the scores of the writing group were highest. These results support the bidirectional hypothesis with a special emphasis on the interaction of reading and writing. The higher-level and the lower-level reading journal writing group had the highest post-test reading scores; however, no statistical significance was noted among the three groups. The results of the reading test do not seem to be clearly related to any hypothesis of reading-writing relations. The results of the questionnaire survey and interview and of the analysis of reading journal suggest that effects of reading journal writing can vary with reading texts and learners’ language proficiency level.

본 연구는 수능 영어 독해력 향상을 위한 다독 프로그램에 대해 교사와 학생들이 가지는 의식과 다독 프로그램에 대한 요구를 조사 및 분석하였다. 이를 위해 서울특별시와 경기도, 강원도, 충청도 소재 국·공립 고등학교 2학년과 3학년에 재학 중인 남녀 고등학생 309명과 동일 학교에서 근무 중인 영어교사 32명을 대상으로 요구조사를 진행하였다. 교사와 학생에게 주어진 설문 문항은 기초 설문 항목, 학교 수업 실태 조사 항목과 다독 실태 조사 항목 및 영어 다독 수업 모형에 대한 요구도 조사 항목으로 구성하였다. 교사의 요구 분석 결과를 종합하면, 교사들은 교과서를 제외한 영어 읽기 텍스트 부족과 읽기 교육 내용의 체계적 구성 결핍을 현재 영어 읽기 교육의 주된 문제점으로 인식했다. 다독을 통해 영어 읽기 능력을 향상할 수 있기 때문에 대다수의 교사들은 교육 여건이 충분하지 못한 상황에도 불구하고 다독 교육이 필요하다는 의견을 보여주었다. 학생 설문 분석의 경우, 지나치게 난해한 표현들이 수능 영어 지문과 EBS 교재에 다수 포함되어 학생들은 영어 읽기 문제 해결에 많은 어려움을 겪고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 대부분의 학생들은 현재 다루고 있는 수능 지문과 EBS 교재 이외에도 읽기 능력 향상과 수능 영어 시험에서 높은 점수를 획득하 기 위해 추가적인 읽기 자료를 원하고 있으며 이러한 교사와 학생의 의식 조사를 통해 수능 영어 독해력 향상을 위한 다독 프로그램의 요구를 확인하였다.

This study investigates the effects of different vocabulary teaching methods on low- level learners`vocabulary and reading achievement in the high school English classroom. The experiment was administered for two months on three homogeneous groups, each of which was taught vocabulary using the definition-based, the pictionary-based, and the context-based methods, respectively. Additionally, a higher proficiency group was also taught in the context method to see how different proficiency responds to the context method. The post-test results showed that the pictionary group performed the best on the vocabulary test with a significant difference from the context group. The pictionary group and the definition group increased in their reading scores while those of the two context groups remained the same. The vocabulary and reading proficiency difference that existed between the two context groups disappeared after the experiment. The results of the study emphasized the benefits of the pictionary method in teaching voca- bulary to low level students and indicate that implicit instruction of vocabulary using contextual cues and inference may not have pedagogical effects on low-level high school students and that it may even affect their vocabulary acquisition negatively.