Since English plays a very important part in Korean lives, Koreans gradually became interested in English education. This paper analyzes English listening items on the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Tests(KSAT) in terms of listening processing and listeni...
Since English plays a very important part in Korean lives, Koreans gradually became interested in English education. This paper analyzes English listening items on the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Tests(KSAT) in terms of listening processing and listening functions. The results are as follows: bottom-up processing decreases gradually and top-down processing increases sightly. The transactional function which focuses on information exchange is more frequently used than interactional function which focuses on interpersonal exchange. The above shows that KSAT measures students’ both selective listening comprehension such a finding detailed informations and global listening comprehension ability such as interpersonal exchange or solving problems. Moreover, the ultimate goal of KSAT is to cultivate communicative competence.