A Preliminary Study Of School-based Spoken English Test

With the development of society, the skill of fluent spoken English has been vital in social and international exchanges. Chinese traditional English teaching has been always laying emphasis on written English. Therefore the testing system developed based on this emphasis has some limitations. In recent years, many foreign testing systems have flushed in and posed challenges to our traditional CET-SET testing system. Spoken English test, an indispensable component of English test, has won more attention and concern from the teachers, test designers and test participants.Throughout the language testing history, the reform of language test is closely related to the development of linguistics. When structuralism was challenged by sociolinguistics, language test was transformed from structuralism test to communicative test. At the same time, with economic development, society needs many more people with English communicative ability. CET Spoken English test (CET-SET) is born at this critical time.However, limited by its large scale, CET-4 has its disadvantages in measuring students' communicative competence, and most of students do not have opportunity to participate in CET-SET. The thesis proposes the tentative idea of school-based spoken English test (SBSET) with the theoretical basis of communicative language test and under the guidance of College English Curriculum Requirements. The main task of this thesis is making a preliminary study on the designing and implementation of SBSET in Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (CQUPT).The thesis covers five chapters. Chapter One introduces the feasibility and necessity of the implementation of SBSET. Chapter Two presents relevant theories concerning the development and classification of spoken English test and test evaluation, as well as the designing purpose, structure, components, testing emphasis and scoring criteria of the major spoken English test, especially CET-SET which serves as a model for the designing. Chapter Three is the designing and implementation of SBSET from the aspect of test purposes, test principles, and pilot test and test operation. Chapter Four gives a detailed statistical analysis, questionnaire and interview survey which prove the validation of the test. Chapter Five is conclusion part which states the findings and limitation of the study.