earticle

영어

In this study, the readabilities of 6th-grade science and social studies textbooks are compared in termsof words, sentences, and paragraphs. In the word analyses, criterion suggested by Kim (2003) in whichabout 238,000 words were classified into 7 categories according to their educational importances wasadopted. In this study, the words from science and social studies textbooks were classified into fourcategories, and then the kinds and frequencies of words included in each category were investigated. Inthe sentence analyses, sentences were classified either a simple, a compound or a complex sentence,and the ratios of each type were calculated. The ratios of conjunctions and demonstratives wereexamined in the paragraph analyses. The results indicated that both the kinds and frequency of wordsin science textbook were smaller than those of social science textbook. However, the distributions ofwords across the four categories were similar regardless of science or social science textbooks. Theratio of simple sentences in science textbook was higher than that of social science textbook, thoughthe ratios of both textbooks were much lower compared to the ratio of language textbook. The ratio ofconjunctions in science textbook was lower than that of social science textbook. However, there wereno differences between the ratios of demonstratives in both textbooks.