Adolescent reading experience, independent choices and curriculum materials

• Corpus methods were used to compare adolescent curriculum and independent reading. • Independent reading texts were more linguistically diverse than curriculum reading. • Curriculum reading had longer, more abstract words than the independent reading. • Independent reading was a closer match to the reading texts used in the GCSE exam. Reading comprehension ability is assessed in England within the English language GCSE exam. This is a high stakes exam, taken by all 16-year-olds, and a pass grade is needed to progress onto the next stage of education and employment. Since reading experience is an important predictor of reading comprehension ability, two different types of reading materials were explored to see how well they matched the reading required in the exam: 1) curriculum reading; and 2) independent reading. Two corpora of texts representing the two types of reading were created and explored using the methods of Corpus Linguistics. The curriculum reading corpus (CRC) had lower linguistic diversity, and higher frequency of nouns but lower frequency of adverbs, than the independent reading corpus (IRC). Exploratory analysis of the most frequent parts of speech revealed that the CRC had words that were more abstract and conceptual, whereas the IRC featured words about the concrete and the everyday, suggesting that curriculum reading presents a different type of vocabulary challenge. The CRC was not as close a match to the exam texts as the IRC. As the English language GCSE exam is used as a measure of literacy competency for both future study and future employment, this suggests that the types of texts chosen for the exam are not a good match for this purpose. The choice of texts in assessments therefore needs careful consideration.