A Study On The Application Of Listening Construct Theories In Communicative Listening Comprehension Tests For CET

This thesis focuses on listening comprehension testing because listening ability appears to be crucial in overall language ability and listening comprehension is found in most general proficiency tests and other types of language tests. Likewise, listening comprehension parts also hold the balance in the National College English Test (CET). By applying the listening construct theories to the actual operation for English tests, this study aims to revise the format as well as the content of the listening comprehension part in CET so as to reinforce and improve the validity and reliability of the nation-wide test. Hence, better performance and effect are hoped to achieve. Chapter One introduces the importance of listening comprehension and current situations of listening comprehension testing. Chapter Two comes to the point of understanding listening comprehension and characteristics of spoken texts are displayed. Chapter Three presents the definition of a listening construct and theories underlying it. A construct can be defined as an ability or a set of abilities that will be reflected in test performance. Therefore, different views on language ability are discussed. Communicative competence is the ability that test takers are supposed to have. As far as the construct definition is concerned, there are three basic ways. The preferable way is to define the target-language use situations and tasks with the guidance of the default listening construct, thus communicative listening comprehension tests can be designed. Chapter Four tries to propose tentative suggestions for the listening comprehension parts in CET, i.e., to attempt to develop communicative listening comprehension tests for CET. It is hoped that the tests can fairly measure the students'communicative competence. Chapter Five concludes that the revised listening comprehension tests (i.e. communicative listening comprehension tests) are not examined and proved by the CET in practice, but the tests can achieve relatively high test usefulness. However, the ideas and study are incomplete and tentative, thus need further theoretical and empirical survey and research to prove and refine.