earticle

영어

This study examines the discourse features in reading passages of revised North Korean high school English textbooks (NKHSETs). For the purpose of this study, three NKHSETs are analyzed with Wordsmith 6.0 and Coh-Metrix Webtools to investigate the cohesiveness, readability of each reading passage and their grade level relationships. Vocabulary and sentence length show similar results in all three textbooks, and the values increase continuously by grade. However, the reading passages of NKHSETs that have an average of 10.41 words per sentence are found to be syntactically simple. Next, the texts are measured to have low cohesion and low grade level relationships. In addition, compared to South Korean High school English textbooks, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) grades of NKHSET are lower. As expected, there is a lack of opportunity for learners in North Korea to experience linguistic clues that could help them understand texts through reading passages. For this reason, North Korean learners should be given not only grammatical forms but also authentic texts that take both cohesion and content into account. Based on these results, it would be helpful to supplement the discourse competence by developing the FKGL from 4th to 8th grade English textbooks for North Korean students.