Validation Study Of A College-Based Listening Test

Listening ability constitutes an important part of a language learner's language competence. However, as is known to all,listening ability assessment is greatly different from assessment of such abilities as in reading, writing, and translating in terms of test content, test method, and test channel. Therefore, much attention should be given to this fact while we are developing a listening sub-test.This study was conducted to validate the listening sub-test of a College Term Test, which was given at the end of the course to assess how successful individual students have been in achieving course objectives through their performance on the test. Besides an overall evaluation of the listening test carried out with reference to Bachman and Palmer's Test Usefulness Framework, a specification of a college-based listening test was designed. The main findings of this study include: 1) The face validity is acceptable and the test covers a variety of listening skills. However, the testing method is confined only to the multiple-choice questions, which is not in accordance with the listening test specification and the construct validity is also questionable because the correlation between two sections of the listening sub-test is only 0.22. 2) The reliability is far from satisfactory, and this is likely to be caused by the item's low discrimination. 3) The facility value of the whole listening sub-test is appropriate. But some items which have extreme values still need to be improved. 4) Many distractors of the multiple-choice questions are weak and this leads to the low discrimination of the items.The validation information about listening test scores is of great importance for the development of the college English listening sub-test. The findings of this research are informative for other similar achievement tests. Particularly, the test specification designed for the college-based listening test is suggestive for other listening tests.