The Study Of Reliability And Validity Of CET-SET

Throughout the language testing history, the development of linguistics is closely related to the reform of language test. When structuralism was challenged by sociolinguistics, language test was transformed from psychometric-structuralist testing topsycholinguistic-sociolinguistic testing. In particular, after Bachman put forward the communicative competence testing theory, communicative language testing stands for the new trend of testing development. At the same time, with economic development, society needs many more people with English communicative ability. GET spoken English test is born at this critical time.Then, how has it come into being and is it reliable and validity? As for this newly developed test, my thesis will give a thorough exploration of its validity and reliability from the perspective of test users theoretically and practically. It indicates that CET-SET is a high reliable and valid test. The scientific scoring system and the strict test administrative procedure contribute to the high reliability; and the effective testing format and overall test content also bring about the high validity. It also analyses the factors which influence the reliability and validity, such as the relationship between the length of test and the tested behavior manifestations, the influences of candidates' personal attributes and testing organization on the performance of candidates' true ability. According to the existing problems, my thesis also advances some feasible suggestions for improvement. All my job is to perfect SET in order to test a candidate's communicative ability scientifically.To communicative testers, the backwash validity fully reflects the relationship between testing and teaching. Testing and teaching depend each other and push forward each other. Testing has positive and negative effect on teaching. In our current college English teaching situation, grammar-translation method was dominated in this field. This traditional method that regards language as knowledge by teaching language elementsis challenged by the communicative testing which test language ability interactively. After investigation and research, we have concluded that as a communicative test, CET-SET produces positive backwash effect on our college English communicative teaching. Therefore, the study of SET validity and reliability is of not only theoretical but also practical significance.