An Exploratory Study Into The Construct Validity Of Listening Comprehension For English Majors

The construct validity of English listening comprehension has received greaterattention in the field of applied linguistics, yet, it has been seldom studied from theresponse formats, the response formats includes of summary, incomplete outline items andopen-ended questions in this paper. In order to explore the construct validity of Englishlistening comprehension, the study mainly relates to the influences of different responseformats of English listening comprehension to test takers’ performance.According to the requirement of listening comprehension in teaching syllabus forEnglish majors and the theories of English listening constructs, the study analyzes theEnglish listening constructs from the following three aspects: the main ideas, the majorideas and the supporting details of listening material. The research questions are: whetheror not the task orders affect the test taker’s performance on listening comprehension forEnglish majors; different effects can be caused by response formats (summary, incompleteoutline items and open-ended questions) on test-takers’ performance of listeningcomprehension for English majors. Supported by available literatures, the experiment, theinterview and the method of collecting data are designed; with quantitative methods, theSPSS and Excel are employed to analyze the data.The listening scores of36English majors in senior from a public university in theeast coast of North China in the experiment are taken as the original data to analyze, andten of them make verbal reports; the test takers’ listening scores of the main ideas, themajor ideas and the supporting details in the summary, the incomplete outline items andopen-ended questions are analyzed and compared.The research findings are that the task orders influence the test takers’ performanceindistinctively; relating to the response format, comparing to the incomplete outline itemsand open-ended questions, the test takers are easy to get the main ideas of listeningmaterials, and in the incomplete outline items, test takers are easy to get the supportingdetails. The study makes concretely analysis of the construct validity of English listeningcomprehension for English majors, which provides empirical evidence for furtherdevelopment of English listening test and may be valuable for the following research.