An Exploratory Study On The Application Of The Note-taking Format In Fast Reading Tests For Chinese College Students Of Non-english Majors

At present, most of China s large-scale standardized language tests do fairly poor on the aspect of authenticity with regard to their testing tasks,with only a finite number of test formats being used, such as Multiple Choice (MC), True/False judgment (actually a variation of MC with only two options) and Sentence-completion. Although those test formats can ensure the reliability and practicality of language tests such as CET-4, they are not the truly authentic tasks as in real life situations where more extended productive rather than selective responses are expected from readers. Thus, they are not the ideal test formats to elicit people s real communicative language ability.Given this condition, the researcher intends to explore whether it is possible to use the Note-taking format (one more authentic language testing task) in fast reading tests for Chinese college students of non-English majors so as to make some contributions to the improvement of the authenticity of fast reading tests and provide some reference for China s reform in English teaching and learning.Bearing this research purpose in mind, the researcher first makes a literature review of the basic qualities of a language test and the nature of reading in order to make clear the relationship between authenticity and construct validity as well as the skills and strategies to be tested by fast reading (i.e. Skimming, Search reading and Scanning); and then the researcher conducts an empirical study by using two groups of participants. Group A is comprised of 114 first-year students of various majors in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), and Group B consists of 111 first-year students of various majors in Wuxi Institute of Commerce. By employing a paired group experimental design, participants in both Group A and Group B are randomly distributed into the experimental subgroup and control subgroup respectively. The experimental subgroups take the fast reading test with the Note-taking format, and the control subgroups take the Skimming & Scanning test of CET-4 in June 2006. This is to investigate the difficulty level and discrimination power of the fast reading test with the Note-taking format and whether it measures the same fast reading skills/strategies with the Skimming & Scanning test of CET-4 as well. Meantime, through an intact group comparison study, the researcher intends to investigate the discrimination power of the fast reading test with the Note-taking format on participants of the two experimental subgroups with different general English proficiency levels. Moreover, through the qualitative analysis of a questionnaire survey, the researcher tries to find out whether the fast reading test with the Note-taking format can be favorably accepted by participants in this study.The research findings prove that the fast reading test with the Note-taking format can roughly distinguish participants of different English proficiency levels and enjoys a good discrimination power. Its difficulty level is lower than that of the Skimming & Scanning test in CET-4. The qualitative analysis shows that the fast reading test with the Note-taking format can be well accepted by most of participants in the two experimental subgroups. Thus, the researcher arrives at a preliminary conclusion that the Note-taking format can be fairly well used in fast reading tests for Chinese college students of non-English majors.