Comparing the Lexical Difficulty of French Reading Comprehension Exam Texts

Autor/in	Milton, James
Titel	Comparing the Lexical Difficulty of French Reading Comprehension Exam Texts
Quelle	In: Language Learning Journal, 30 (2004) 1, S.5-11 (7 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0957-1736
Schlagwörter	Comparative Analysis; Difficulty Level; Reading Comprehension; French; Language Tests; Second Language Learning; Reading Tests; Foreign Countries; Standards; United Kingdom + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Schwierigkeitsgrad; Leseverstehen; Französisch; Language test; Sprachtest; Zweitsprachenerwerb; Lesetest; Ausland; Standard; Großbritannien
Abstract	There is an acknowledged difficulty in demonstrating that the standard of school exams remains constant over the years. It is a source of debate every summer when exam results come out. There is some evidence that foreign language exams, and French in particular, have declined in standard since the 1980s, but empirical measures to demonstrate this objectively are rare. This paper describes a measure of lexical difficulty which has been applied to reading comprehension texts taken from A level, O level and GCSE exams delivered through the 1980s and 1990s. It shows that this calculation is a workable measure of comparative difficulty in the texts used in exams, and therefore of standards across time. More interestingly, it shows that O level texts are lexically harder than current GCSE texts and this supports other evidence that GCSE French is a linguistically easier exam than its predecessor. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures, and 1 note.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10