The Guidance Of Schema Theory To The Construction Of College English Reading Tests

Testing is an indispensable part to the making of teaching. A successful test can not only inform the teachers and students of the progress the students have made but also diagnose weakness in teaching and learning, which contributes in turn to the development of teaching. As a matter of fact, the importance of testing in teaching has long been recognized and many researchers have been working on this field. They hope to find ways and techniques to improve the quality of tests so as to measure more accurately the candidates' true performance. This thesis also concerns about this issue so as to design better reading tests.If good reading tests are expected to be constructed, first of all, the nature of reading and some reading theories are to be explored and studied in order to get a better understanding of what underlies in the process of reading. It is generally accepted that reading is a psychological and cognitive process, with several factors involved, such as the reader's linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the world, attitude toward reading. It is rather complex. Schema theory makes a more profound explanation to reading. It holds the view that reader's background knowledge plays a significant role in discourse comprehension, which decides on whether a reader can understand a text or not. If a reader possesses sufficient knowledge about the content and the rhetorical feature of the text, he can make sense of what the author conveys. If not, he has no way of getting meaning. When a reader applies his schemata to guide him through reading, he in reality adopts the top-down process to make predictions and assumptions about the incoming text. Simultaneously, he uses the bottom-up process to acquire information from decoding words, phrases and sentences in the text. This process assists him to be aware of the new information and to make proper adjustments. The continuous interaction of both the reader and the text leads to an agreement on the text, which signifies the accomplishment of reading. Even though reader's background knowledge has great impact on reading, some reading skills are also essential. With a good command of them, the reader can fulfill his task more successfully. As far as the objective of the teaching of collegeEnglish reading is concerned, it is mainly to develop in students the ability to get information. So the skills such as finding important facts and details, reading for main ideas, making inferences and drawing conclusions are particularly stressed.Since the importance of background knowledge in reading has been widely accepted and well established, its influence on reading tests should also be paid attention to. When designing a reading test, the test designers should first consider if the test provides enough opportunities for the candidates to use their background knowledge so that it will not interfere with the demonstration of their reading skills. That is, the test designers should apply schema theory to the construction of reading tests with regard to the selection of test materials and the construction of test items. More specifically, the topics of the texts, the types of the texts, difficulty level, length of the texts and authenticity of the texts should be in accordance with the requirements of schema theory. If these are taken into account, the candidates will have adequate chance to employ their schematic knowledge and linguistic knowledge to display their potentials. In addition, the test designers should also be clear about the purpose of the test. Before writing the test, they must draw up a table of specifications as to the skills to be checked and their percentage weighting in the whole. With an appropriate application of schema theory and a greater awareness of the test purpose, they are bound to devise a better reading test and get more satisfactory result.Armed with much knowledge on how to construct reading tests, the author supplies a sample test constructed on the guidelines of these principles. It is administered to a class of college students u...