A Contrastive Study On The Reading Comprehension Components Between Tem-4 And CET-6

It is well known that both Test for English Majors (TEM) and College English Test (CET) are nation-wide standardized tests of English proficiency for college students in China. Reading comprehension constitutes a very important part for both tests. The present thesis aims to make a comparative study on the reading comprehension components between TEM-4 and CET-6.The theoretical basis of the present paper is Bachman's theory of communicative language ability (CLA) and test method facets (TMF). Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are adopted in this paper to explore the following questions:1) What are the similarities and differences of the test content (including characteristics of texts, item format and reading skills measured by reading tasks) of reading comprehension components between TEM-4 and CET-6?2) Is there a significant difference of difficulty level between the two reading sub-tests?3) Is there a significant difference of discrimination power between the two reading sub-tests?4) How is the correlational relationship between the test performances on the two reading sub-tests?The author first collected altogether six reading comprehension sub-test papers used recently by TEM-4 and CET-6 to establish a small corpus, within which altogether twenty-one reading comprehension texts are involved. The author has made a detailed analysis of the test content of the reading comprehension components of TEM-4 and CET-6 from the following three aspects: facets of the reading texts (vocabulary, syntax, readability, topical areas, and textual cohesion), facets of the expected response (item format) and facets of the skills measured by the reading comprehension tasks. Second, experimental tests and questionnaire survey were conducted to explore the relationship of difficulty level, discrimination power, and the correlation of reading comprehension components between TEM-4 and CET-6.The findings of the present study reveal that the reading texts in CET-6 are generally more difficult to comprehend than those in TEM-4. The testing tasks of reading comprehension in CET-6 are more difficult and more discriminative than those in TEM-4. The reading sub-test of TEM-4 and CET-6 do not highly correlate with each other.