Reading Comprehension Passages of Iranian General English Books and MA Reading Comprehension Tests: A Corpus Analysis

This is a corpus study aimed to compare six Iranian general English university textbook’s reading comprehension passages and the passages of reading comprehension section of MA exams from 2010 to 2014. The study used three reading related factors to make the comparison: vocabulary coverage, syntacti...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Seyyed Bagher Mirshojaee, Rahman Sahragard
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, 2015-03-01
Series:Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Subjects:
Online Access:http://jmrels.journals.ikiu.ac.ir/article_797_9523fd0a3ac5e740286984698b3963e8.pdf
Description
Summary:This is a corpus study aimed to compare six Iranian general English university textbook’s reading comprehension passages and the passages of reading comprehension section of MA exams from 2010 to 2014. The study used three reading related factors to make the comparison: vocabulary coverage, syntactic complexity and discourse features. To meet these needs, three test types were used: measures of vocabulary coverage by the vocabprofiler software, measures of readability by means of readability formulas and measures of text easibility of the Coh-Metrix software. The analyses showed a big gap between what textbooks offered with regard to vocabulary, structures and discourse and what the MA examinations asked from the readers regarding the reading comprehension processes. The findings and results were presented along with the pedagogical implications and some suggestions for future researches. <strong> </strong>
ISSN:2676-5357
2676-5357