| Test for English Majors Band Four (TEM-4) and Test for English Majors Band Eight (TEM-8) are both vital tests to evaluate teaching quality of English majors in China, language proficiency of English majors as well as one of important focus points by English testers and testing studies. Reading comprehension is a critical part in both tests. Vocabulary is the basic building blocks of a complete text. There are many studies about TEM in China, however, several studies focus on micro texts analyses. The distribution of lexicon is closely related to text readability as well as readers’understanding of the texts. Therefore, based on lexical features analyses, this paper conducts contextual feature analyses, especially text readability.This paper analyzes the features of vocabulary and context, under the guidance of lexical richness and text readability in relation to reading comprehension in Test for English Majors Band 4 (TEM-4) and Test for English Majors Band 8 (TEM-8) from 2000 to 2014 by using corpus analysis softwares RANGE, Coh-Metrix Version 3.0. This study explores to solve several problems. (1) What are the lexical features and contextual features in reading texts of TEM-4 from 2000 to 2014? (2) What are the lexical features and contextual features in reading texts of TEM-4 from 2000 to 2014? (3) Are there any similarities and differences on lexical features and contextual features between TEM-4 and TEM-8 reading texts? And what are they, if there are? In this study,60 texts in TEM-4 and 60 texts in TEM-8 are collected from 2000 to 2014. RANGE and Coh-Metrix are used to make analyses of lexical richness and text readability. After that, all the data are put into SPSS to conduct statistical analyses.Research results of TEM-4 and TEM-8 reading texts are as follows. First, there are statistically significance in lexical variation between TEM-4 and TEM-8 reading texts. The differences are reflected on TTR ratio of content words and of all words. TTR ratio of content words of TEM-8 reading texts is higher than that of TEM-4 reading texts. As for word frequency, incidences of content words in TEM-8 reading texts are almost twice of that in TEM-4 reading texts. As for function words, pronouns occur more often in TEM-4 reading texts. There are obvious differences in readability between TEM-4 and TEM-8 reading texts. Second, for text readability, there is significant difference between TEM-4 and TEM-8 reading texts. TEM-8 reading texts are more difficult than that of TEM-4 when considering for the grade level,FKGL of TEM-8 reading texts is two levels higher than that of TEM-4 reading texts. There are statistically differences in three components-narrativity, syntactic complexity and connectivity. For other five components, there is no significant difference. Limitations are also found during the study process. On one hand, computation soft-wares can be used to analyze the superficial features of vocabulary, and thus, for the deep part, such as psychological part, it is not so efficient. On the other hand, as this study focuses on the vocabulary only, it may deepen the analyses if the reading tasks are involved. For this sense, the depth of this study can be pro-founded. |
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