An analysis of the test characteristics of the nationwide middle school English listening tests: Based on speech rate and Coh-Metrix analyses

The purpose of the current study is to compare and contrast the two standardized middle school English listening tests; the National test and the Seoul test. To compare the test characteristics of the 20 items for each test, the speech rate as well as 9 linguistic features selected from Coh-Metrix (a web-based text-analysis tool) were analyzed. Coh-Metrix measures were analyzed under the following categories: basic counts, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and discourse coherence. 60 middle school students participated in this study to compare the test results and the overall difficulty. To calculate the speech rate (WPM), Praat and MS Excel were used, and Coh-Metrix was used to compare the aforementioned linguistic measures of each listening test. The test results revealed that the average score of the National type was higher than that of the Seoul test. The analysis on the speech rate demonstrated that the average speech rate of both test types belonged to ‘Moderately Slow’ based on the standard speech rate classification (Pimsleur, Hancock, & Furey, 1977); however, the speech rate of the Seoul test was found to be significantly higher. Most of the linguistic features analyzed were about the similar measures. Pedagogical implications will be discussed.