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| The Journal of Asia TEFL |
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  Current Issue |
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Go List
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| Volume 20 Number 4, Winter 2023, Pages 754-1004 |
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Vocabulary Coverage of the Basic English Vocabulary List from the Korean National Curriculum and the BNC in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT)
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Dennis Murphy Odo
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The present investigation explored the vocabulary coverage of the basic word list from the Korean Na-tional English Curriculum and the most frequent word lists from the British National Corpus (BNC) on the reading comprehension section of the English test in the CSAT examination in Korea. This was done to ascertain whether there was sufficient coverage to ensure suitable comprehensibility of the CSAT reading passages. The RANGE program was used to compare the overlap between CSAT reading passages with the basic word list and the word lists from the BNC. The findings of the study revealed that the word list from the national curriculum covered roughly 80% of the vocabulary in the examination passages. The most frequent 3000 words from the BNC revealed a mean coverage of less than 90%. These results fall below the minimal coverage of 95% necessary to ensure adequate com-prehension. The number of words needed to achieve the minimum coverage of 95% was 6000 known words and that for optimal coverage of 98% was 9000 known words. These results were largely in ac-cordance with those reported in other studies in both EFL and ESL contexts. They suggest that the English reading section of the CSAT is excessive in its demands for receptive vocabulary knowledge.
Keywords: Vocabulary size, Vocabulary coverage, High-stakes testing, College entrance exami-nation, national curriculum |
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The Journal of Asia TEFL
