The purpose of this study is to suggest the way of measuring text difficulty to select eligible reading texts for each student’s Korean level. Basically, text difficulty can be the most concerned factor in a procedure of selecting texts, but there i...
The purpose of this study is to suggest the way of measuring text difficulty to select eligible reading texts for each student’s Korean level. Basically, text difficulty can be the most concerned factor in a procedure of selecting texts, but there is a few studies related to readability in the field of Korean Education. Therefore it is required to study of the objective tools for matching readers to texts, and this study tries to develop the measurement to evaluate the texts for Korean reading education.
Emphasizing the features of text itself which is contrary to traditional readability formula theories, this study regards only surface features as the factor for predicting text difficulty.
After taking word difficulty and sentence length as the common surface features that affect readability following the preceding researches, two more features selected; grammatical unit and ‘adorning expression’. This ‘adorning expression’ is a newly proposed notion in this study, which contains idiomatic expression including proverb, the collocation whose meaning has something more than literal meaning, the rhetorical expression such as figures of speech, personification and irony, the indirect expression and the cultural expression that strongly implies cultural background.
Regarding word and grammar difficulty, the formula is established with the criteria of the inventory in Kim, J. S., et. al. (2011) and the sentence length is calculated by the average number of words in text. For the adorning expression, the formula is established with the number of adorning expressions per the number of sentence in text.
With these formulas, the standard texts were analyzed and each formula’s validity was proved. The texts developed by the expert groups, which are widely admitted, and whose level had been already established were selected as standard; 135 samples from the reading tests in Test of Proficiency in Korean and 72 samples from the Korean textbooks published by Korean Culture Education Center of Korea University.
Applying this measurement of text difficulty, 21 texts from the KAP books and 16 texts from the real world materials were analyzed and the possibility of its utilizability in Korean reading education was investigated.
It has to be basically performed to measure linguistic features that make it difficult to read quantitatively for continuing and developing studies about readability or text difficulty. From this point of view, this could be a significant and full-scale study of text difficulty in Korean reading education.