A Comparative Study Of Listening Subtests In NMET And IELTS-Based On Communicative Language Testing Theory

Listening, as the prior skill among the four basic language skills--listening, speaking, reading, writing, its significance and necessity is self-evident. The levels of listening comprehension often reflect the levels of English learning and language competence to great extent. In interpersonal contacts and communication, listening comprehension is the first step, as well as a crucial factor. Successful listening comprehension can help reach the goal of smooth interpersonal communication and achieve good communication expectations. English curriculum standards for average senior schools (experimental) clearly points out that the overall objective is to develop students'comprehensive language competence. Focusing on comprehensive language competence, it gives priority to listening ability.Taken by the largest group of students currently in China, National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is considered as the most authoritative test. For one thing, it is a comprehensive learning assessment of students after three years of high school study, for another, it is an important certificate with which students can enter universities to obtain higher education. Since 2002, listening test has been contained in NMET with 30 points of scores, accounting for a large proportion in NMET. Therefore, the level of listening comprehension directly influences the results of NMET. Along with the development of communicative language teaching approach and communicative language testing theory, as well as the conduct of high school new curriculum reform, communicative competence is attaching more and more importance in English teaching. However, whether NMET which plays the role of evaluation and guidance to English teaching can authentically reflect students language competence, whether the listening test in NMET can authentically test the communicative competence, a few researches have conducted the studies in such fields. IELTS is by far the world recognized the most scientific and widely used testing system, for which the theoretic basis is communicative language testing theory. Selecting IELTS as contrastive objective, it has a high degree of reference and comparison.This study first reviews the development of communicative language ability and language testing theory, then selects authenticity of language testing as its standard, through testing objective, tasks, input materials, and other aspects to make a detailed comparative study of listening tests between NMET and IELTS. Since current implementation of provincial design of NMET papers, this study adopts the national examination paper test I containing listening test as the sample, and Cambridge IELTS 7 as the contrastive objective, to make a comprehensive analysis of six listening tests altogether. Through the comparative study, it finds that the listening tests in both NMET and IELTS have authenticity, however, IELTS has a relatively higher degree of communication than NMET.Through analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of listening test in NMET, and absorbing the good points of listening subtest in IELTS, this study obtains some beneficial implications for foreign language teaching and learning, as well as some suggestions for the reform of NMET. The author hopes these enlightenments getting from this research can help and show the directions of foreign language teaching in senior schools; as the suggestions for NMET, the author hopes they could make some modest contribution to the reform of NMET under the new curriculum reform.