A Study On The Texture Factors Influencing Eading Comprehension Difficulty In NMET Hunan

Reading comprehension is an important part of National Matriculation English Test (NMET). National Matriculation English Test plays a crucial role in determining the destiny of test-takers, so many scholars study the problem solving skills and strategies to help students improve their scores. Few papers are written to study texture difficulty of reading comprehension and no paper is written to study the influence of several factors on texture difficulty in reading comprehension. Texture difficulty has certain influence on reliability and validity of reading comprehension testing. As a result, this study chooses the test-takers who take part in NMET in Hunan as the subjects and investigates which factors affect texture difficulty in reading comprehension in NMET in Hunan and how much these factors affect the texture difficulty. This study provides some advice for testing designers and teaching reading.This study conducts an empirical study of factors which are likely to influence texture difficulty in reading comprehension in NMET in Hunan, including lexical difficulty, syntactic difficulty, text type, text structure and text coherence. A lot of data are collected and analyzed to verify whether these factors have influence on texture difficulty in reading comprehension in NMET in Hunan and how much these factors influence the texture difficulty. This study takes students who participate in NMET in Hunan in2008and2009as research subjects and NMET volumes and software AntWordProfiler as instruments. Due to large number of the test-takers, this study first conducts sample drawing from test-takers and then uses correct rate of items of a passage to represent the texture difficulty of this passage. Lexical difficulty of passages in NMET is measured by software AntWordProfiler and specialists are required to rate on syntactic difficulty, text structure, text type and text coherence. Rater consistence is also analyzed. Finally, all the data collected are put into SPSS for Linear Regression analysis.The conclusion is as follows:Syntactic difficulty has great influence on texture difficulty in reading comprehension in NMET in Hunan. The factor sentences with insert has the greatest influence on the texture difficulty and the factor sentences with WH-be omitted and the factor sentences with relative pronouns or relative adverbs omitted also have certain influence on texture difficulty. Text structure exerts certain influence on texture difficulty in reading comprehension in NMET in Hunan. To test-takers, argument structured passages are most difficult, problem-solution structured passages are the second most difficult and the list/description structured passages are the easiest. Because of limitation of conditions, this study only investigates two years’passages in NMET. The generalization of conclusion based on it is to some extent limited.