부산대학교 도서관

As there is not any test which is more important than KSAT in Korea, it is inevitable that many people including students and their parents are sensitive to the difficulty issues of KSAT. Especially, there have been many controversies related to KSAT English and preventing the controversies can be a reason of administering KSAT English in criterion-referenced from 2017. However, listening comprehension part of KSAT English has been regarded as easy and has been a step away from difficulty issues. To find why listening comprehension parts have been regarded as easy to students, speech rate was chosen as a factor. Therefore, this paper analyzed words per minute (WPM) of 16 KSAT listening comprehension to find which degree of speech rates have been used in KSAT. The analyses were based on the criteria suggested by Pimsleur et al. (1977) and Richards (1983) which decide the degree of speed in terms of native speakers’ natural speech. As a result, it was found that average WPMs of all 16 listening comprehension parts belonged to ‘Moderately slow’ in which 130 to 160 words are told in a minute. In terms of the slowest item, among 16 items, 15 items were found to belong to ‘Slow’ category which has a range from 100 WPM to 130 WPM and only one item (the slowest item in KSAT for 2015) which was not in ‘Slow’ belonged to ‘Moderately slow’. On the other hand, 7 fastest items belonged to ‘Moderately slow’ and the other 9 items belonged to ‘Average’ which represents the range of 160-190 WPM. As a result, KSAT can be told that it is not reflecting the natural speed of native speakers’ natural speech and it makes listening comprehension part easy. In other words, KSAT has been using unauthentic listening materials which can be a barrier for students’ improving of their listening comprehension ability for real life communication. Also, it does not coincide with the national purpose of English learning and this easy listening comprehension is a factor which KSAT English have low discriminability. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to check the anticipated result of speed up in listening materials. In the experiment, two groups of students took listening comprehension test with listening materials modified in terms of speed. Modifications were done to make the original material that belonged to ‘Moderately slow’ belong to ‘Average’ (by making it 1.2 times faster) and ‘Moderately fast’ (by making it 1.4 times faster). Between two groups, the group marked higher score took the test with 1.4 times faster version, the material belongs to ‘Moderately fast’ and the other group took the test with 1.2 times faster version, the ‘Average’ speed material. The results showed that the faster the material is, the more difficult the test is. In addition, the more difficult the test is, the more discriminable the test is. All in all, through the analyses on WPM and the experiment, they showed KSAT listening comprehension parts include the materials with slow speech rate and speed up of the listening material can help the KSAT to have more discriminability than now, although KSAT will be administered in criterion-referenced way from 2017.