| IELTS, a standardized test of English language proficiency, has enjoyed a growing popularity across the globe. In addressing the growing need for proper IELTS tests, this research would like to investigate the content validity of IELTS academic reading texts.With the fast development of psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, information extraction, and discourse processing, Coh-Metrix has enabled this research to quantitatively investigate textual features of IELTS academic reading texts, which further leads to a better understanding of the content validity of IELTS academic reading texts.48IELTS academic reading texts were analyzed with Coh-Metrix3.0and the data could be referred to as a statistical description of textual features of IELTS academic reading texts specified by IELTS test specifications. Then15pairs of texts before and after IELTS adaptation were also analyzed with Coh-Metrix3.0and the results were compared using t test.The research findings are invariably related to the content validity of IETLS academic reading texts. IETLS academic reading texts are usually adapted from texts twice their length with increased type token ratio. The analysis of pronoun incidence has shed light on styles of IELTS academic reading texts, which generally fall into two categories:one is intimate discussion of universal issues; the other is alienated discussion of objective factors. Besides, narrativity, incidence of connectives, meaning overlaps and other indices have all generated insightful findings in this research. |
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