A Study On The Consistency Of Syntactic Complexity Of Reading Texts Of National Matriculation English Test Papers

The proportion of students’ reading comprehension skills tested in the NMET is significant.The study of NMET reading comprehension questions is highly valued by English educators and researchers.But current research on reading comprehension in NMET has paid less attention to the syntactic complexity of the reading passage.This thesis attempts to analyze the consistency of reading syntactic complexity of2020-2021 NMET Papers based on the related syntactic complexity theories and seek to answer the following two research questions:1)What are the characteristics of syntactic complexity of reading passages in National Matriculation English Test(NMET)papers from 2020 to 2021? Is there a consistency of syntactic complexity among the reading passages in NMET?2)Are there any significant differences of reading texts among NMET papers from2020 to 2021? And if yes,what are they?This thesis collects all NMET papers from 2020 to 2021,with a total of 22 sets,82 reading texts.These NMET papers include the New NMET Papers,National Papers and Local NMET Papers.With the assistance of an advanced computational tool L2 SCA,the thesis measures the syntactic complexity of each reading passage,and data is extracted from a total of 14 indicators in five dimensions for analysis.The following findings and conclusions were drawn from the analysis.(1)From the perspective of different years,there is no significant difference in the syntactic complexity of the two-year NMET reading comprehension passages,which indicates that the two-year NMET reading comprehension passages have the same syntactic complexity.From the point of view of different types,according to the results,there is also no significant difference in the syntactic complexity among the three types: New NMET Papers,National Papers and Local NMET Papers.It shows that there is a consistency in the syntactic complexity of the reading comprehension texts in three types of NMET papers.And it also indicates that the design of NMET papers meet the relevant requirements in terms of the syntactic complexity of the selected material.(2)There are 22 sets of NMET papers,among which there are significant differences in the dimensions of length of production unit and amount of subordination.From the perspective of different passages,the 14 syntactic complexity measures of Passage A to Passage D of NMET papers in the 2020 and 2021 did not rank from easy to difficult.Passage A is slightly longer than the other Passages,but the overall sentence complexity of the text is lower than that of the other Passages.This shows that the sequence of the reading texts in some NMET papers is not determined by their difficulty,and that the test designer’s understanding of the test questions’ difficulty and gradient may be improved.