A Design And Practice On The College English Oral Test Model At Fundamental Stage

With the development of society, tests for spoken English have been appealed for due to the fact that more and more qualified English speakers are desired in all walks of life. Meanwhile, in order to keep up with the new developments of higher education in China, deepening teaching reform, College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR hereafter) was drawn up by the Ministry of Education in 2004. The CECR explicitly pointed out that the objective of College English was to develop students' ability to use English in all-round way, especially in listening and speaking. And the CECR recommended a Computer- and Classroom-based Multimedia College English Teaching Model to strengthen the teaching of college English listening and speaking. However, the research and practice of a continuous College English oral testing model at the fundamental stage has not been extensively conducted in China.The author intended to establish a set of continuous College English Oral Test Model at Fundamental Stage (CEOTMFS hereafter) and put it into practice. In establishing the CEOTMFS, the author adopted Wen Qiufang's Cross-cultural Communicative Competence Model as the theoretical basis to measure different aspects of the cross-cultural communicative competence which consisted of communicative competence (including linguistic competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence) and cross-cultural competence. Based on Bachman's Test Development Model, the author drew out the development procedures of the CEOTMFS: setting the test purpose, working out the test content and tasks; establishing the scoring criteria and scoring methods, training the examiner and administering the tests.The CEOTMFS the author had devised consisted of seven mid-term and final-terms oral tests in the first two years of college studies. Sixty college students majoring in Food Science and Engineering in Beijing Forestry University were chosen as subjects to attend the series of sample tests and questionnaires were distributed to them for investigation. The Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS, version 12.0) was used for the statistical analysis of the data of test scores and questionnaire feedback. Through a verification of the test validity, reliability and practicability, the CEOTMFS including a set of task-based classroom oral English tests carried out at different levels by phases and with reference to an advanced theory basis proved to be a set of workable model. This model could appropriately measure the efficiency of teaching and learning, more importantly, to promote the improvement of the oral English teaching and enhance students' learning autonomy. The revelation of this model for the teaching and learning of College oral English was that the teacher should strengthen the cultivation of both students' communicative competence and cross-cultural competence by various means in class, and with different focuses in different phases at the fundamental stage of college English study, and moreover, students should be stimulated to improve these two abilities after class by continuous training and practice.