Lexical Threshold of L2 Reading in the Korean CSAT

Abstract

For over two decades in Korea, no other English exam has been able toreplace the high-stakes Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). From a lexical perspective, there has been transient analysis of the readingpassages, however, without sufficient attention it deserves as thenationally administered exam. Twenty-one years of the main CSAT ofEnglish reading texts for academic years 1994 through 2014 were utilizedto compile a specialized, small corpus. For analysis, lexical richness(STTR) was calculated, and distribution of the CSAT words across thefourteen word bands of the British National Corpus (BNC) was searchedwith RANGE to propose a lexical threshold level. By STTR, lexical varietyindicated to be steady over the twenty-one years of the CSAT. However,the recent 2014B CSAT exhibited a noticeable increase of words comparedto the CSAT in previous years, pressuring test-takers to improve readingfluency. The range and the percentage of CSAT words across the 14 wordbands of the BNC indicated test-takers to minimally need a threshold of6,000 word families for 95% coverage (including proper nouns) of theCSAT reading passages. The study ends with implications for L2vocabulary learning.