A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea

Yan Wu; Rong Liu

doi:10.47297/wspiedWSP2516-250036.20261004

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A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea

10卷第4期

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A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea
A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea
School of Humanities and Foreign Languages, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi, 030600, China
2026年10卷第4期页码：166-171
纸质出版：2026-04-30
DOI：10.47297/wspiedWSP2516-250036.20261004
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Yan Wu & Rong Liu. (2026). A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea. 国际教育与发展（英文版）, 10(4), 166-171.

Yan Wu,Rong Liu.A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea[J].Journal of International Education and Development,2026,10(04):166-171.
Yan Wu & Rong Liu. (2026). A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea. 国际教育与发展（英文版）, 10(4), 166-171. DOI： 10.47297/wspiedWSP2516-250036.20261004.

Yan Wu,Rong Liu.A Study on the Difficulty of Reading Passages in Senior High School English Textbooks in China, Japan, and Republic of Korea[J].Journal of International Education and Development,2026,10(04):166-171. DOI： 10.47297/wspiedWSP2516-250036.20261004.

摘要

Abstract

This study compares reading difficulty in high school English textbooks used in China

Japan

and Korea. Drawing on a cross-national corpus of textbook reading passages

it integrates the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and NeoSCA to examine difficulty from two complementary perspectives: macro-level readability and micro-level lexical and syntactic complexity. The results show that Japanese textbooks are positioned at a significantly lower readability level than Chinese and Korean textbooks

while the latter two are broadly comparable. At the lexical level

Chinese and Japanese textbooks tend to show greater lexical diversity and broader use of higher-level vocabulary

whereas Korean textbooks rely more heavily on repeated use of a concentrated core vocabulary. At the syntactic level

Chinese and Korean textbooks generally employ longer and denser structures

while Japanese textbooks favor shorter and less embedded constructions. The findings show that textbook difficulty is a multidimensional configuration rather than a single uniform property.

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