A Text Difficulty Analysis of English Textbooks for Senior High School and the College Scholastic Ability Test in South Korea Using Coh-Metrix

AbstractThis study aimed to examine the text difficulty of English textbooks for senior high school and the Englishreading section of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) in South Korea. By analyzing the degree oftheir text difficulty, this study attempted to predict how effectively public education can prepare for theCSAT. Five types of high school English reading and writing textbooks representing the new 2015curriculum, as well as reading passages from the 2019-2020 CSAT English section, were chosen to createa corpus. The text difficulty was compared with linguistic features measured from Coh-Metrix, acomputational language analysis tool on: descriptive indices, word information, lexical diversity, syntacticcomplexity, standard readability, and cohesion. An independent sample t-test is employed to determinewhether there are any statistically significant differences in terms of linguistic aspects between thetextbooks and the CSAT. In conclusion, except for the syntactic complexity and semantic cohesion,textbooks and the CSAT indicate statistically significant differences in 10 of the 13 Coh-Metrixmeasurements: the number of syllables in words, the mean number of words in sentences, age ofacquisition, word frequency, concreteness, imaginability, type-token ratio, Flesch Reading Ease, FleschKincaid Grade Level, and co-referential cohesion. This finding implies that students who follow the schoolcurriculum and rely on textbooks would have difficulty achieving their CSAT goals. A balance betweenthe difficulty of textbooks and the CSAT should be established to accomplish the CSAT's purpose ofnormalizing public education and relieving the strain of excessive learning