A Survey Of Tests In The Course Of English Learning In Senior High School In Moderate And Small Cities

The new "Curriculum Standards for High School English" attaches much importance to formative evaluation. Most tests provided in the course of English learning fall into the same category. This survey is designed to examine the validity and backwash of this kind of test so that we can find something beneficial to facilitate our English teaching.The survey focuses mostly on content validity of formative tests carried out in subject schools, especially on that of grammar and vocabulary subtests. The validation research is conducted by means of experienced teachers' assessment and questionnaire. We take the test paper by Educational Science Academy of Ministry of Education of Shanxi Province as validity measure and ask experienced teachers to compare the validity measure with test papers collected from various high schools (hereafter called sample test papers) to see whether or to what extent the sample test papers agree with the validity measure in terms of coverage of key language points in the test and the quality of testing items. On the basis of the teachers' judgments, the score of each test paper is assigned as an indicator of the test quality.The study results reveal that on the whole the sample test papers are inferior to the validity measure. And to one's surprise, tests constructed by key schools put less emphasis on the key language points than those by ordinary schools.This survey finds out that the validity of formative tests in moderate and small cities is far from satisfactory. Teachers don't think much of formative tests and have little knowledge of test theories.The further analyses of aforementioned problems disclose the following findings: Firstly, teachers don't value formative evaluation very much whereas they put great emphasis on summative evaluation. Secondly, they lack basic knowledge of test theories and are ignorant of the functions and main uses of various tests. Thirdly, they don't know how to carry out formative evaluation.At last, this paper gives some advice to teachers: Teachers should learn some basic test theories. They should improve the quality of formative tests and include enough and right rate of the key language points of each unit. They may have one test for several units instead of one test for each unit. And the form of formative tests may be more elastic. Teachers should also analyze the results after each test and find out some information to help adjust their English teaching.