• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.14 no.8
• /
• pp.528-541
• /
• 2014

The purpose of this study is to analyze Yun Chi-ho's English Diary both quantitatively and qualitatively. A corpus of 574 diary texts is created from his first and last years in an English speaking environment, and analyzed by two language analysis programs, RANGE and Coh-Metrix. His later diaries have more words in total, and longer average sentence length than his earlier diaries. Also, the Coh-Metrix indices in syntactic complexity and referential cohesion are higher in his later diaries. A qualitative analysis of 57 diary texts shows some improvement in his use of language forms. The most frequent topics of his journals are Christianity, everyday life, politics of Korea and his English studies. His constant effort to keep his journal and correspondence with foreigners, almost all in English, is estimated as one of the key factors for his successful English acquisition. Educational implications for EFL writing courses are discussed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.22 no.6
• /
• pp.116-124
• /
• 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine the vertical and horizontal continuity between grades and publishers, respectively, by analyzing the readability of reading passages included in English textbooks for 5th and 6th grades of elementary school. In order to do so, a corpus was constructed with the reading passages contained in 10 textbooks, and the reading passages in each textbook were analyzed through Coh-Metrix. Also, it was examined whether there was a statistically significant difference between grades and publishers in readability through one-way ANOVA. The results are as follows. First, as a result of analyzing the difference in readability between publishers within the same grade, there was a statistically significant difference between fifth-grade textbooks in the L2 readability index. Second, as a result of analyzing the vertical continuity between grades within the publisher, the difficulty of textbook A was higher in grade 6 than grade 5 based on FRE and FKGL, which showed a statistically significant difference. On the other hand, when L2 readability was used as the standard, the difficulty of textbook B was lower in 6th grade than in 5th grade. This result seems to be because FRE and FKGL calculate readability based on sentence and word length, whereas L2 readability is based on content word overlap, word frequency, and syntactic similarity of sentences.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.17 no.12
• /
• pp.378-385
• /
• 2017

The aim of this study was to analyze cohesion and word information among different types of questions in the English reading section of the College Scholastic Ability Tests (CSAT). The types of questions were divided into three categories: macro reading, micro reading, and indirect writing. Reading texts from 1994 to 2017 CSAT were analyzed by Coh-Metrix, an automated evaluation program of text and discourse. The findings of this study indicated that there were statistical differences among the three categories of questions for noun overlap, stem overlap, adversative and contrastive connective, additive connective, pronoun incidence, age of acquisition, concreteness for content word, imagability, and meaningfulness. The information of the findings bore pedagogic implications for developing textbooks, questions for CSAT, and reading strategies by students.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.699-719
• /
• 2016

Alternate pictures that are proven to be equivalent are in high demand to assess creative thinking and language skills. This study aimed to investigate the equivalence of three pictures ('Dog owners,' 'Lost Dog,' and 'Overslept') recently developed for use in a creative writing task. Middle school students (N=183) wrote a story in English based on one of the three prompts distributed randomly. Four writing features (fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and temporality) were analyzed with Coh-Metrix and MANCOVA. The three prompts were largely equivalent in their capacity to detect differences among writers in all the features of writing. The difficulty levels of the three prompts, however, were not necessarily the same. Two prompts, Dog Owners and Lost Dog, were verified as equivalent prompts, and therefore, they are recommended as alternate forms to assess creative language skills in repeated measurements. The Overslept prompt had greater facility in eliciting diverse words and more temporal connectives in composing stories. The differential difficulty shown among the prompts suggests that the validity of using different picture versions in repeated assessment remains questionable unless those versions undergo equivalence verification.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
• /
• v.45 no.6
• /
• pp.543-552
• /
• 2022

This study compared and analyzed with the United States(USA) to evaluated the level of readability of radiotherapy information (English text) provide to foreign patients with cancer by medical institutions in South Korea (KOR). A total of 20 the KOR and USA medical hospitals in 10 each provide information for radiation therapy technology were selected. The readability was comparatively analyzed a total of three aspects (lexical, syntactic, cohesion and readability) by using a Coh-Metrix on-line web program. In readability respect, the mean of the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) was lower in the KOR (8.3) than in the USA (23.2), Flesch-Kincaid grade level (FKGL) was higher in the KOR than in the USA (14.2) indicating that KOR was less readable than the US (p<.05). In both KOR and USA, the reading level (literacy) of the English text for the radiation therapy was found to be higher than high school (FRE level 50 or lower). Therefore, text information in English for the radiation therapy to foreign patients with cancer should be lowered to elementary school level and read to improve the quality of medical services.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.20 no.5
• /
• pp.344-350
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this study was to investigate the cohesion-related text factors that affected the correct answer rate of the English reading section in the Korean CSAT. To this end, reading passages of the 2014-2018 CSAT and CSAT mock test were collected and analyzed in terms of cohesion. And then, correlation analysis was implemented between the results regarding cohesion and item difficulty. The conclusions were as follows. First, the correct answer rate tended to increase as the linguistic burden of learners was reduced, when specific arguments between sentences were repeated. Second, there was no statistically significant correlation between the 8 sub-area of latent semantic analysis and the correct answer rate. Finally, the pedagogical implications of this study and suggestions for further study were discussed.