A Study On Content Validity Of English Listening Test In Senior High School Entrance Examination Of Zhoushan

The senior high school entrance examination is a large-scale standardized test to evaluate students’ study achievements and select students to get further study.Recently,with the development of English in compulsory education,the test is constantly being reformed.The content validity of the test is considered to be an important measure of test quality.However,the current listening test in senior high school entrance examination doesn’t meet the expectations,and there are some problems such as the single form of test questions and low discrimination,which affect the validity of the test.Therefore,it is of great value to analyze the content validity of the English listening test.This study takes Bachman and Palmer’s task characteristics framework,English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education,China’s Standards of English Language Ability,and the teaching syllabus as the basis to establish a framework that fits the characteristics of the test.Quantitative and qualitative analysis is used to verify the content validity of the listening test through text analysis and questionnaire survey.Two specific questions are as follows:1.What are the task characteristics and trends of the English listening tests in the senior high school entrance examination of Zhoushan?2.How is the content validity of the English listening tests in the senior high school entrance examination of Zhoushan?After the collection and analysis of data by SPSS and Excel,the following results are obtained.In the past six years,basically conforming to the design principles of language test and covering most of the requirements of the standards for listening,the English listening tests have reached a relatively high content validity.The topics are covered in a wide range and are close to students’ daily life.The text difficulty is appropriate for students,and the skills tested are generally in line with the standards.Generally,the tests tend to include more topics and place emphasis on the development of students’ logical reasoning abilities.There are also some problems with the test.In addition to a relatively single genre and question type,there is also a partial overlap of topics.The listening skills are unevenly tested,and the speech rate is faster than the requirements of the syllabus.To improve the content validity of the listening test,the factors affecting the content validity are explored based on the results,and some effective suggestions are put forward for the test design and textbooks compilation so as to enrich the research on content validity and promote the development of the listening test.