The Study Of Oral English Testing In Some Large-scale EFL/ESL Tests From A Communicative Perspective

With the development of society, the skill of fluent spoken English has been vital in social and international exchanges. Chinese traditional English teaching has been always laying emphasis on written English. Therefore the testing system developed based on this emphasis has some limitations. In recent years, many foreign testing systems have flushed in and posed challenges to traditional CET-SET system. Oral English test, an indispensable component of English test, has won more attention and concern from the teaching authority and test participants.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 psychometrics-structuralist testing to psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic testing. In particularly, 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. CET Spoken English test (CET-SET) is born at this critical time.Based on the theoretical model- communicative competence as a principle of oral English testing design, the thesis makes a throughout and complete analysis by comparing the existing tests including CET-SET, IELTS Oral and TOEFL TSE from different angles such as designing purposes, structure and components, testing emphases and scoring criteria. Via the analysis of the questionnaires, I can put forward some suggestions to improve our CET-SET. To language testers, the backwash of testing fully reflects the relationship between testing and teaching. Testing and teaching depend each other and push forward each other. I hope the research can have positive influence on college oral English teaching.The thesis covers five chapters. Chapter One introduces the states of communicative language testing, the purpose of this study and research methods. Chapter Two presents the relevant theories concerning the history of English language testing, and the communicative competence theory that becomes the direct theoretical foundation for the communicative teaching approach and for the communicative language test as well. Chapter Three Concerns on a throughout and complete analysis by comparing the tests including CET-SET, IELTS Oral and TOEFL TSE from different angles such as designing purposes, structure and components, testingemphases and scoring criteria. The method of qualitative analysis is mainly employed in this thesis. Chapter Four gives a detailed introduction of the survey made on CET-SET. Statistical methods are used to analyze the data obtained. The process of analysis may help the oral test designers or teachers gain further understanding towards standard oral test which in turn will have positive influence on their oral English teaching. Chapter Five is the conclusion.