An Investigation Of The Vocabulary Distribution And Out-of-syllabus Words In Graded Reading Materials For Chinese As A Second Languag

Vocabulary selection of graded readers is a key factor affecting text grade,text difficulty assessment,reading experience and other issues.Therefore,this study selects six Chinese graded readers as research objects,conducts a multi-dimensional investigation of their vocabulary selection,and focuses on the selection of hypersyllabus words.This thesis is divided into five chapters,of which the second to fourth chapters are the main part.The second chapter is the analysis of the selected vocabulary of graded readers.First,we investigated the overall writing of the vocabulary of the reading materials,including the distribution of vocabulary size and word-level spacing,etc.After horizontal comparison of the vocabulary level distribution of the six sets of reading materials,we analyzed the characteristics of vocabulary difficulty of the reading materials,and finally examined the recurrence rate and co-selection of vocabulary.It is found that the vocabulary difficulty of some reading materials is too high,and the vocabulary level spacing is too large.The study found that the above problems are related to the selection of reading materials and vocabulary selection standards.Lexical recurrence is related to text volume and content relevance.The third chapter is the analysis of the selected hypersyllabus words of graded readers.First,we explain the definition of hypersyllabus words,and then discuss the annotation ratio of hypersyllabus words and the common degree of hypersyllabus words in graded readers.After that,we carried out a statistical analysis of the number of hypersyllabus words,and finally investigated the recurrence rate of hypersyllabus words.It is found that a large number of hypersyllabus words are not annotated in the readings,and the overall recurrence rate of the hypersyllabus words in the readings is low.The forth chapter is the analysis of the difficulty of hypersyllabus words in graded readers.We mainly examine the influence of hypersyllabus words on the difficulty of text comprehension from two aspects: semantic transparency and context strength.Firstly,we classify the semantic transparency of the hypersyllabus words in the reading materials,and test the feasibility of this classification method with tests,and find that most of the hypersyllabus words are relatively transparent words or completely transparent words.Second,we examined the contextual strength of the sentences in which the hypersyllabus words are located through tests,and found that roughly half of the hypersyllabus words were in a strong context.In addition,we have proved through testing that the contextual strength of sentences can be improved by rewriting sentences,thereby helping readers to improve the accuracy of word guessing.Finally,we find that both semantic transparency and contextual strength can help improve learners’ correct word guessing rates through semantic transparency and contextual strength interactive tests.