A Study On Validity Of NMET National Third Version

The National Matriculation Test is the most influential one among many exams in China.As a high-stakes test,the validity of National Matriculation English Test(NMET)has always been the focus of academic circles.Validity has been considered as the core standard to measure the quality of a test.Since 2016,Guizhou Province started to use the New Curriculum Standards of the third volume as the English test.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze and study the validity of the NMET(Guizhou province).The goal of this thesis is to find out the validity of the NMET national third version from 2016 to 2020.This research combines qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to analyze the validity of the NMET national third version in recent five years.Firstly,analyzing the content validity through the comparison among the syllabus and the New Curriculum Standards and the test papers in the recent five years.Secondly,according to the theory of Bachman’s communicative language testing,the construct validity of the test is comparison between the language competences proposed in the recent five years and Bachman’s communicative language testing theory.Thirdly,according to the point validity model put forward by Professor Li Xiaoju,this thesis analyzed college entrance English cloze,grammar cloze,and proofreading from 2016 to 2020 from test point level and focus factor by using text analysis and quantitative method.Finally,the washback effect is also known as the one of validity.In this research,through teacher’s interviews,classroom observations and questionnaires to explore the washback in English teaching.The study finds out that this five-years NMET is formulated according to the requirements of the exam syllabus and the New Curriculum Standards.So they have high content validity.As for construct validity,the five-years exam not only tests language knowledge,but also examine the examinee’s discourse ability and pragmatic ability,which means these exams are based on the theory of communicative language competence test.That is to say,the five-years NMET has high construct validity.In terms of point validity,which are high validity.The results show that washback effect exists,and it has both positive and negative effects on teachers’ teaching.All in all,this thesis hopes to offer some valuable suggestions to the design of NMET paper and English teaching in high school.