A Study On The Communicative Character Of Ielts And Its Inspiration On Cultivating English-Learners’ Communicative Competence

Language as a tool plays a significant part in bridging and facilitating different individuals to build upfine relationships in social interactive communication, therefore, of all the English competences,Communicative Competence plays a pivotal role in measuring a student’s foreign language ability, from theperspective of communicative competence, the main purpose of language teaching is to teach students howto reorganize, reproduce and then output what they have learned into creative ideas and enable studentscommunicate effectively in actual communication, it’s universally acknowledged that testing has asignificant impact on the teaching and learning, which is commonly described as “washback” or“backwash”. Therefore, language testing has become a new research field for the researchers to evaluateand reform the current teaching and testing system. As for the communicative test, International EnglishLanguage Testing System (IELTS) has been regarded as the fair test template by testing authority both hereand abroad because of its high reliability, validity and objectivity, however, in our country, most of the testsresearchers focus their attention on the domestic tests (NMET,CET,TEM), few of them put their eyes on thelarge-scale international test (IELTS, TOFEL). Its fundamental basis and scientific merits has not been fullyrealized thus the research on cultivating the communicative competence is truly limited.In this thesis, firstly, the author tries to make a panoramic analysis to the communicative character ofIELTS and summarize its theoretical basis so as to familiarize this international scientific testing system tothe test-takers, language teachers and most importantly to the test researchers; and all the studies of thetests must serves as a feedback to the teaching and testing field, consequently, duo to its strong validity intesting the candidates’ communicative competence and according to the IELTS’ testing material selection and its administration, the author puts forward some references and enlightenment to cultivate the students’communicative competence in the teaching and testing field respectively.This thesis is made up of six chapters:Chapter one introduces the extremely importance of the communicative competence in languageteaching and learning and bases on the present situation, proposing the purpose and the significance of thisstudy.Chapter two presents the theoretical review of the communicative competence study, which includesthe theoretical frameworks and different definitions of communicative competence, among which, theauthor lay more emphasis on the framework of communicative language ability (CLA) due to itscomprehensiveness and generality. Then the author discusses the historical development of language testingand then illicit some distinguished features of the communicative language test.In Chapter three, the author makes a systematic investigation to each component of the IELTS, firstly,through analyzing the tasks in four section which include listening, speaking,reading and writing, theauthor reaches the conclusion that the four parts of IELTS are all the specific manifestation ofcommunicative testing theory, and in terms of the test authenticity, interactiveness and integrity as well asits reliability and validity, its fundamental principles are also in accordance with the requirements ofcommunicative testing, lastly, through investigating the scoring method, IELTS’s Marking Criterion bearsmuch resemblance to the grade mode of communicative testing, all these finding proves that IELTS has astrong communicative character and it can surly test the candidates’ communicative competence to thelargest extent.Chapter four presents the status quo of communicative competence teaching and testing system inchina, in the teaching field, the author describe the communicative language teaching in China which shows that the students’ communicative competence is always neglected by the teachers due to theunbeneficial teaching method; as for the testing field, the concentration on the knowledge rather than actualuse in daily communication and too much rely on the passing rate also hinders the fostering of thecommunicative competence.In Chapter five, based on previous researching, the author illustrates some positive backwash effectsof IELTS in communicative Teaching, and then proposes some illuminations to the domestic testing systemto gain a better assessment of test-takers’ communicative competence.Chapter six is the conclusion of this thesis, which makes a summary of the major findings andimplications, and lastly, the author presents the limitations of this study and gives enlightenment to thefurther study.