| Description | This data collection consists of reading comprehension and summary
writing texts. The texts comprise of the final year high school exam
texts for Home Language (HL) and First Additional Language (FAL)
subjects written in South Africa between 2008 and 2020. The text
collection contains texts from all eleven official South African
language subjects: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu,
Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Siswati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga. PDF
versions of the texts were downloaded from South Africa's Department
of Basic Education online public access repository. Plain text was
extracted using pdftotext (version 22.02.0). The texts were then
tokenized using Ucto (version 0.21.1). The data collection contains a
total of 429 exam text files comprising a total of 1,314,551 tokens
with 131,650 types (i.e., unique tokens). Of these, 223 are HL texts
that have 689,730 tokens and 88,009 types, whereas the 206 FAL text
documents contain 624,821 tokens with 73,451 types. In addition to
the full exam texts, the reading comprehension and summary writing
texts are extracted manually. The data is useful for studies
investigating, e.g., linguistic properties, text readability, text
properties, text difficulty, and linguistic complexity in any of the
eleven languages. Furthermore, both intra-language and inter-language
comparisons can be made. |
