خلاصة:
This is a corpus study aimed to compare six Iranian general English university
textbook’s reading comprehension passages and the passages of reading
comprehension section of MA exams from 2010 to 2014. The study used three
reading related factors to make the comparison: vocabulary coverage, syntactic
complexity and discourse features. To meet these needs, three test types were used:
measures of vocabulary coverage by the vocabprofiler software, measures of
readability by means of readability formulas and measures of text easibility of the
Coh-Metrix software. The analyses showed a big gap between what textbooks
offered with regard to vocabulary, structures and discourse and what the MA
examinations asked from the readers regarding the reading comprehension
processes. The findings and results were presented along with the pedagogical
implications and some suggestions for future researches.
ملخص الجهاز:
reading comprehension, vocabulary coverage, readability, text easibility Key words: * Department of English, Shiraz university , Iran -Received on:07/01/2016 Accepted on: 27/02/2016 Email: s.
Nassaji (2003) indicates that vocabulary knowledge is the most powerful element among other reading comprehension components for 60 university level English as second language (ESL) learners.
Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) found that university students in Israel needed enough vocabulary to cover 98% of the examination reading texts (6–8,000 word families) in order to obtain a score on a university entrance examination which indicated they could read academic material independently (with or without the aid of a dictionary).
To sum up, what this study aimed to do was to compare the reading passages of MA examinations of Iran and the reading comprehension of Iranian general reading textbooks regarding their vocabulary demands, readability and easibility.
3. Method This study used three strategies namely vocabulary frequency, readability measures and text easibility tool to compare the reading passages of general English textbooks and MA examination reading passages.
The following table shows the frequency percentage of different corpora in the study regarding their lexical coverage of K1 words meaning the first 1000 most frequent words: Readability software (read.
Table 3 PThe Frequency Percentage of K1 Vocabulary Level across Corpora Corpus MA RGE Exam GERUS LR GE BEUS BERUS K1 Words 75 .
Table 4 The Frequency Percentage of K2 Vocabulary Level across Corpora Corpus GE LR MA Exam BERUS BEUS RGE GERUS K2 Words 5.