Improving The Authenticity Of The Listening Sub-Tests In Tem

Listening ability constitutes an important part of a language learner's language competence. This universal agreement entails an inclusion of a listening sub-test in any English proficiency test aimed at evaluating the candidates' comprehensive competence. Being a criterion-referenced proficiency test, both TEM4 and TEM8 contain a listening sub-test in their test battery. In this case, improving the authenticity of the listening sub-tests in TEM will no doubt be a contributory factor in improving the authenticity of the whole test. As is known to all, listening ability assessment is greatly different from assessment of such abilities as in reading, writing and translating in terms of test content, test method, and test channel. Therefore, much attention should be given to this fact while we are developing a listening sub-test. Based on the analyses of the current listening sub-tests used in TEM, the author concludes that the sub-tests are satisfying in eliciting the English majors' listening competence as expected in the English Teaching Syllabi for English Majors of Institutes of Higher Learning. Yet as discussed in detail in Chapter 3, there is some inauthenticity in the test tasks. One remarkable inauthenticity comes from the input. That is, while listening to the tape, we found that the same two foreigners, usually one female and the other male, do the recordings from the start to the end. Though they tried all their best to adjust their tones, intonations, pitches, speech rates, etc., they cannot conceal the fact that through the recordings there are only two readers with RP pronunciation parroting pre-written scripts. There is no accent change in the recordings, few hesitations, pauses, and other features characteristic of spontaneous spoken language. This is not in keeping with the requirement for listening teaching in the national teaching syllabi, in which English majors are supposed to familiarize themselves to some major English varieties (for example, Australian-accented English and Canadian-accented English) during their four years of study in universities. In addition, the test tasks seem stereotyped in the current tests. This goes contrary to the fact that, in real life, students are exposed to varying listening situations and expected to perform various listening tasks. For example, listening and filling in a form, listening to a telephone message and jotting down the main points, listening to a debate and giving one's own comment, to name just a few. Considering from the viewpoint of communicative language teaching and testing, the author maintains that an overuse of multiple-choice question types in the TEM sub-tests will lead to fossilization of test tasks and that varying question types will improve the authenticity of test tasks.In order to solve these two problems, the author suggests that major English varieties and limited-constructed-response question types be included in the TEM sub-tests so as to improve the authenticity of the tests and accuracy of the assessment.According to the author, inclusion of accented English and limited-constructed-response question types in the current tests will inescapably give rise to increase of test difficulty. And as a result, this will bring about an effect on students' test performance as well as scores. But this effect, looked at from the purpose of TEM, is positive and helpful. It will take the test user to the closest proximity to the real listening proficiency of the testees.In order to verify his assumption, the author constructed a specially-designed listening test, called the experimental test, in Chapter 6. The test includes two parallel sub-tests, labeled as Test A and Test B respectively. In Test A, everything is designed as the current TEM listening sub-tests. In Test B, both accented English and limited-constructed-response question type are included. The experimental test results indicates that a listening test including accented speech and limited-constructed-response question types may observably increase te...