A Diachronic Study on the Content Validity of the 2016-2019 TEM-8 Section A Based on Corpus
Abstract
TEM-8 is an important high-risk examination for all senior English majors. By exploring the content validity of the section A part of the 2016-2019 TEM-8 reading, this paper aims to provide reference for the future direction of TEM-8 reading, and also to help students understand some of the contents of the TEM-8 reading examination in recent years to help them prepare for the exam. This paper mainly compares with the requirements of the TEM-8 test syllabus to explore the content validity of the reading article in the theme, genre, vocabulary density and length of the article in 2016-2019. It is concluded that in terms of theme and genre, the articles in recent years basically meet the requirements of the syllabus of the TEM-8 examination, but in the genre, the proportion of argumentative papers and narratives is on the high side, which should be deleted. Besides, this paper builds a corpus of reading articles in recent years, and uses LancsBox corpus retrieval software to make statistics on lexical type, token and type-token ratio. In terms of lexical density, the difficulty of articles in recent years basically meets the requirements of the syllabus of the TEM-8 examination, but the distribution of lexical density in 2017 is slightly unreasonable, so we should pay attention to avoid this phenomenon in the future. In terms of the length of the article, in addition to the uneven distribution of the text words in 2017, the length of the articles in this four years is reasonable, which meets the requirements of the total number of words in the syllabus of the TEM-8 examination and the number of words read per minute.
Copyright (c) 2021 Yu Zhang
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