A Coh-Metrix-Based Study On Consistency Of Reading Text Difficulty Of National Matriculation English Test Papers

At present,most of the researches on reading comprehension of NMET pay less attention to the difficulty of reading materials.Thus,this thesis attempts to analyze the consistency of reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET papers based on the related text difficulty theories and the NMET test specifications of these years.To fulfill the above stated objective,this study seeks to answer the following two research questions: 1)Is the reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET papers consistent in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability? If so,what are the longitudinal features? 2)Is the reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET Paper I,II & III consistent in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability? If so,what are the cross-sectional features?Based on the multilevel framework of discourse comprehension(Graesser et al.,1997;2011),and in reference to various text factors affecting text difficulty,there are four crucial factors for predicting text difficulty,which include lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence as well as readability.With the assistance of an advanced computational tool Coh-Metrix,the thesis adopts qualitative method and draws the following conclusions:1)The reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET papers is generally consistent in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability.However,there are some significant differences within some measures in different years.Specifically,in terms of overall consistency,the adjective incidence and colorado meaningfulness for content words within lexical complexity are both significantly higher in 2018 than in 2017 and 2019.The incidence of preposition phrase density within syntactic complexity is significantly higher in 2018 than in 2017.The word concreteness within readability is significantly higher in 2018 than in 2019.As for specific consistency,the NMET Paper I & III show significant differences in terms of syntactic complexity & cohesion and coherence respectively.Thus,theresults indicate that the NMET papers are generally in line with the requirements of2016-2019 Test Specifications in spite of some significant differences.2)The reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET Paper I,II & III is generally consistent in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability.Specifically,the reading text difficulty of 2016-2019 NMET Paper I,II & III is completely consistent in general,without any significant difference,but is generally consistent every year,only with some significant differences within some measures in different years.Therefore,the results show that2016-2019 NMET Paper I,II & III all generally meet the requirements of each Test Specification in each year,and compile with the test materials proposition principle.