高考全国卷与江苏卷的英语阅读难度对比分析A Contrastive Analysis of the Difficulty Levels of the National and Jiangsu College Entrance English Reading Tests开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

1.Introduction1.1 Research backgroundCollege entrance examination is a national unified selection examination for qualified high school graduates. It will comprehensively measure the candidates' achievements and select the best ones according to the candidates' achievements and enrollment regulations. In 1983, English was officially included in the college entrance examination and became a very important subject in the college entrance examination. Before 2000, China had adopted the national unified proposition test paper; from 2000 to 2004, the state began to implement the organizational model of "unified college entrance examination and provincial proposition", and more and more provinces joined the ranks of independent proposition, including Jiangsu Province. With the acceleration of globalization, English plays an important role in various fields, and people pay more and more attention to English. Reading comprehension is the largest and longest item in the annual college entrance examination English papers. It is also the main item type that must exist in the English college entrance examination. It requires candidates to have strong reading ability in order to complete this topic within the corresponding time. Based on the quantitative analysis of English reading articles in the college entrance examination, this paper analyzes the national volume and Jiangsu volume respectively. On the basis of detailed data, compare the difficulty of the selected articles, judge whether they comply with the objective principles of lexical diversity and readability, and hope to get some opinions to help students improve their English performance.1.2 Purposes of the researchWith the advancement of globalization, the importance of English has also increased. The difficulty of English reading in different regions varies according to the level of education in different regions. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate the corresponding test difficulty according to the level of education, including the difficulty of reading articles in English. For high school foreign language learners, the use of texts suitable for their language level will contribute to the development of their language ability (Crossley et al., 2012; Hiebert Kontovourki, 2012). In order to achieve good learning results, it is necessary to match the complexity of the text with the language level of foreign language learners. With the development of science, the research of computer and language learning is more and more closely combined. Therefore, more and more attention has been paid to the application of computer and information technology in the research of second language acquisition in order to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of second language teaching. Therefore, this paper will use R package to make a contrastive analysis for English reading passages between national and Jiangsu college entrance examinations comparative.Therefore, this paper will use English reading passages between national and Jiangsu college entrance examinations as analysis object to achieve these two purposes. Firstly, this paper analyzes the factors affecting the difficulty of English articles from three dimensions: syntactic length, lexical diversity and readability. Second, the conclusions of this study will be used to provide some meaningful suggestions for English learners in order to find correct ways to improve their reading level and English achievement.1.3 Organization of the researchThis thesis proceeds in the following way:The first chapter introduces the reasons why we choose English reading in the college entrance examination, and why we choose the national volume and Jiangsu volume as the research object. Then, it expounds the research purpose and significance of this paper. Finally, the organizational structure of the paper is given.The second chapter reviews the research on discourse difficulty analysis at home and abroad, and makes a critical summary of the previous research.The third chapter describes the methods used in this study. Firstly, the research problems of this study are put forward. On this basis, collect data details from different angles and design research procedures. Therefore, the reasons for this method are provided. It also gives a brief introduction to research tool: R packages.The fourth chapter introduces the main findings of data analysis. This includes results based on two qualitative research techniques. In addition, the content analysis results of text difficulty, vocabulary complexity and the proportion of low-frequency words are also considered.The fifth chapter includes a detailed description and explanation of the research results, involving each research problem and previous relevant research results. The last chapter summarizes the main findings. Then it expounds the limitations of this study and puts forward some suggestions for future research.2. Literature reviewThe research on the difficulty of articles can be traced back to the early 20th century. Since then, many researchers began to participate in the research on the difficulty of articles. They studied it from different angles. Scholars have raised a variety of questions, as well as a variety of measurement methods and influencing factors of the difficulty of the article. The application of article difficulty in the field has attracted extensive attention, especially in the examination. This chapter summarizes the difficulty of the article. The first part briefly describes the definition of the difficulty of the article and the factors affecting the difficulty of the article. The second part is a review of the empirical research on reading and examination at home and abroad.2.1 Definition of article difficultyThe concept of article difficulty can be defined in many ways, and some researchers provide their own views in books. The Longman Dictionary of language teaching Vermeer, 2000; Liu , 2003; McNama-ra et al., 2010; Wan , 2010; Fan, 2012, etc.).In addition, other studies are based on the word frequency table and directly calculate the lexical complexity through software statistics. For example, R package used in this study investigates the lexical complexity of the text. 2.3.3 Measurement of syntactic lengthSyntactic length is an important measure of syntactic complexity length, including T-unit length and clause length (W/ C). They are two important length measures of syntactic complexity and are widely used by researchers.According to the syntactic length, it can be divided into long sentences and short sentences.Long sentences have a large number of words and complex structure, so they have strict meaning and rich content, which is more difficult and difficult to understand. Short sentences have fewer words, simple structure and flexible meaning, which are easier to understand in reading comprehension. Syntactic length will affect the difficulty of the article to some extent, which is why I choose this as one of the research parameters. 2.3.4 Empirical studies on the difficulty of article in examination In China, English tests take an important role in determining the academic achievements of students. However, article difficult study in English tests is not widely conducted at home. Nevertheless, Gu Guan (2003) made a sampling study on the readability of comprehension passages of CET tests and that of collage English textbooks. The underlying principle called readability principle behind the study was that the reading difficulty of comprehension passages in CET 6 should higher than that in CET 4 and the readability level of reading materials at the same level should be consistent.

2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

1. Research questionsThis thesis is aimed to explore the difficulty of college entrance examination English papers through the comparative analysis of English reading between national and Jiangsu papers. It will find answers to the following research questions:1) Is the lexical readability of Jiangsu college entrance examination higher than that of the national college entrance examination？2) Is the syntactic length of Jiangsu college entrance examination larger than that of the national college entrance examination?3) Is the lexical complexity of Jiangsu college entrance examination larger than that of the national college entrance examination？2. Research MethodsThe subjects of this study were English reading in Jiangsu and the national college entrance examination in 2021. The measurement of text difficulty will be carried out through the measurement of lexical readability, syntactic length and lexical complexity.2.1 The measurement of lexical readability Lexical readability will be measured by Flesch test formula designed by Rudolf Flesch. 2.2 The measurement of syntactic length and lexical complexitySyntactic length and lexical complexity are calculated by R package. The package is of multitudinous functions to analyze texts.2.3 t testThe obtained samples will be tested by t test to yield associations between the samples.