A Comparative Study On The Listening Subtests Of The Paper-and-pencil Cet4 And The Internet-based Cet4

The present study takes listening components in Paper-and-Pencil CET (PP-LT for short) and internet-based CET (IB-LT for short) as the objects and attempts to compare the two listening sub-tests as to their item types, whether they measure similar listening micro-skills and language competences and as to their facility value, discrimination ability and correlation to each other.Based on Bachman's models of Communicative Language Ability (CLA) and of Testing Methods Facet (TMF), the comparative study is carried out from three aspects: test content analysis, language competences tested by the two listening sub-tests and data analysis. The findings of the study show that, different from PP-LT, IB-LT applies both audio and video clips, and question (i.e., stem) preview is available in it; both IB-LC and PP-LC cover all the four language competences (grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence) proposed by Bachman (1990) and focus on the skill of understanding important or particular details, but the ability of understanding relationship between sentences, which concerns textual competence, becomes more important in IB-LC, and compared with IB-Dictation, PP-Dictation covers more listening micro-skills and more communicative language competences; IB-LT is more difficult than PP-LT and its discrimination ability is not better than PP-LT, which indicates that the listening component in PP-CET is a very mature English listening proficiency sub-test.At present, the IB-CET is still at the pilot-test stage, so most of the front-line teachers and even some scholars are not familiar with it. Therefore, the author carries out this exploratory comparative study to unlock, hopefully, the mysteries of it and hopes to provide some empirical data for further improvement of testing of listening comprehension in CET and the teaching.