Rahnman Sahragard - Shiraz University
Seyyed Bagher Mirshojaee - Shiraz University

This is a corpus study aimed to compare six Iranian general English university textbook‟s reading comprehension passages and the passages of reading comprehension section of MA exams from 2010 to 2014. The study used three reading related factors to make the comparison: vocabulary coverage, syntactic complexity and discourse features. To meet these needs, three test types were used: measures of vocabulary coverage by the vocabprofiler software, measures of readability by means of readability formulas and measures of text easibility with the Coh-Metrix software. The analyses showed a big gap between what textbooks offer with regard to vocabulary, structures and discourse and what the MA examinations ask from the readers regarding the reading comprehension processes. The findings and results were presented along with the pedagogical implications and some suggestions for future researches

reading comprehension, vocabulary coverage, readability, text easibility