TEXTUAL COMPLEXITY IN VIETNAM’S POST-REFORM ENGLISH EXAMS: A 2025–2026 CORPUS COMPARISON
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63506/jilc.1002.454Keywords:
linguistic complexity, corpus analysis, English examination, Vietnam, cohesionAbstract
This study examines textual complexity in the 2025 and 2026 Vietnamese National High School Graduation English exams. Using a small-scale corpus-based descriptive case comparison, the study analyzed one official paper from each year and section-level sub-corpora, including reading passages, cloze texts, item stems, answer options, and sentence-arrangement fragments. Four automated corpus-analysis tools were used to measure lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion. Results show no uniform increase or decrease in complexity. The 2026 paper was shorter and slightly less lexically diverse overall, but section-level profiles varied. Reading passages became less lexically diverse yet more syntactically complex. Because the study is limited to two official textual cases and several short sub-corpora, findings are interpreted as descriptive evidence, not proof of test difficulty or year-level effects.
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