[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]As the nationally administered English test, NEAT is to be offered starting from next month in a full-fledged manner, there are those who claim that it is necessary to strengthen English book reading education in order to increase English test score.

Class 1 National English Ability Test (NEAT) will be administered for the first time on March 9. The first test will be administered to select the teachers who applied for the overseas training program. The test for the general public will be offered starting from May of this year. This year, Class 1 NEAT test will be offered six times (March, May, July, September, October and November).

Class 2 and Class 3 NEAT tests developed to replace the English section of the university entrance exam appear as if they will be available only after 2018 whereas the initial plan was to offer them in 2015.

NEAT test is the official English test administered by the nation, and it is divided into Class 1 that is offered to the general public and into Class 2 and Class 3 that replace university entrance exam. To replace the famous foreign English test and to strengthen the speaking and writing English education, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology invested 39.3 Billion Won to develop this Internet based test that measures English language capability in four dimensions; listening, reading, speaking and writing.

Accordingly, well-renowned language institutes in the private English education sector are competing to open up the programs and lectures intended to help prepare for the NEAT test. Even the experts of the English language education are claiming that it is necessary to strengthen English book reading education in order to score high on the NEAT.

Dr. Malbert Smith III, the President and a Co-Founder of the MetaMetrics® in the US that developed the Lexile® Measure(www.lexile.com) to ensure effective English book reading, emphasized that greater focus should be on reading English books in order to develop the four domains of the English language (listening, reading, speaking and writing) in a balanced manner.

“To increase competency in the English language, continual exposure to English is crucial. In particular, when students are exposed to English continually through English book reading amidst the situation in which they learn English as a foreign language, they obtain the necessary information, get to understand the culture of the English speaking countries, improve their vocabularies while they benefit from significant improvements in the rest of the three domains as well (listening, speaking and writing).”