The Feasibility Of Measuring Reading Ability By The Format Of Short Answer Questions

In recent years, Bachman's model of the Communicative Language Ability has become increasingly popular. The theories about the measurement of test usefulness put forward by him have aroused great interest and been adopted in the design and evaluation of language tests. Test usefulness incorporates six desirable qualities: validity, reliability, authenticity, interactiveness, impact and practicality. They constitute an organic system, one quality interacting with another. The test developers'main task is to find an optimal balance among them so as to guarantee the usefulness of language tests.The Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) format is probably the only choice that test developers would like to turn to in their construction of reading tests. Its reliable scoring and efficient administration had once made people regard it as the only feasible as well as practical test format. However, it arouses, with the advancement of language testing theories, more and more skepticism among experts in this field. This paper sets out to propose a new test format– Short Answer Questions (SAQs)– for reading tests. The author chose some non-English majors from Shanghai University for Science and Technology as the subjects and made comparison between the two test formats– MCQs and SAQs– that appeared in their mid-term examination. By means of quantitative and qualitative measures, the author studied the formats in terms of their validity, reliability, interactiveness, practicality and their impact. Conclusions are drawn and tentative suggestions provided in the hope that the problems with MCQs might be overcome, thus putting forward one more choice for the reform of CET-4/6 testing that has been put on its agenda.