| Reading comprehension always occupies the prominent position in English language tests. In most cases, reading comprehension takes up the most score weight in tests. TEM8and IELTS are very influential and typical large-scale tests in China. Therefore, the analysis on text complexity of the two tests can be beneficial for providing significant validity evidence for both tests. However, previous studies on text analysis of large-scale tests are far from enough and comparative studies between TEM8and IELTS are much less.This study aims to conduct a comparative analysis on reading texts of TEM8and IELTS from the perspective of text complexity. Based on the framework of the impact of text factors on text complexity, there are four crucial factors for predicting text complexity, which include lexical complexity, syntactical complexity, cohesion and coherence as well as readability. With the assistance of a computational tool Coh-Metrix, it enables the author to investigate text complexity in depth by providing abundant indices of text variables. The author has collected reading materials of6test papers of TEM8and Academic IELTS which amount to42reading texts. Through respective analysis of these texts by Coh-Metrix, all indices for predicting text complexity are collected for analysis by SPSS in depth. In the end, the discussion proceeds in detail based on the obtained data and analysis.The study presents the result of analysis of text complexity between the two large scale tests:1) texts in TEM8have a wider lexical coverage of high frequency words while lexical coverage of low frequency words in texts of IELTS is denser than that of TEM8according to word frequency distribution of the two tests. Besides, the analysis demonstrates the mean of word length in reading texts of IELTS is longer than TEM8counterpart and more diverse words and more concrete words are employed in texts of TEM8;2) With regard to the differences in syntactical complexity, it turns out syntactical structure in TEM8is more complicated than that in IELTS;3) It appears that texts in TEM8tend to use referential cohesion whereas texts in IELTS are testified to be better in deep cohesion and LSA overlap between paragraphs. Moreover, IELTS is inclined to include more causal connectives while texts in TEM8cover more extended temporal connectives;4) No significant difference is discovered according to traditional readability formulas whereas Coh-Metrix L2Reading Index illustrates text readability of TEM8is more readable for L2learners than that of IELTS.Apart from some limitation of the study, it is expected to give insights into the basic differences of text complexity between TEM8and IELTS based on concrete data analysis in order to provide validity evidence of TEM8and IELTS and benefit TEM8test designers, test takers, English teachers and learners. |
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