Morphological Properties of Czech Entrance Exam and School-leaving Texts

Abstract

The goal of this contribution is to present some morphological traits that characterize texts to be found in tests used as entrance exams and secondary school-leaving exams in Czechia. To this end, we make use of a newly compiled 16,000-word corpus amassing the exam tests from the 2019–2023 period. The texts are subjected to key parts of speech and key grammatical tag analyses, which determine whether there are differences among various types of exam situations (eight-year secondary school, six-year secondary school, four-year secondary school, secondary school-leaving exam). In addition to these, we study case and grammatical number distributions, and frequencies of prepositional cases, perfective/imperfective verbs, verb tenses, and the passive forms. We hypothesize that more advanced exam texts utilize more items of autosemantic parts of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs), more prepositional cases, and more complex grammatical structures. The research outcomes may be of use to test makers, teachers preparing children to pass the exams, and authors of didactic reforms.

Presenters

Zaneta Stiborska
Student, PhD, University of Ostrava, Moravskoslezský kraj, Czech Republic

Lucie Radková
Assistant Professor, Department of Czech Language, University of Ostrava, Moravskoslezský kraj, Czech Republic

Michal Místecký
Assistant Professor, Department of Czech Language, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

Literacies Learning

KEYWORDS

Education, Exam, Corpus, Quantitative Linguistics, Morphology, Czech Language