The Application Of Communicative Reading Test In College English Test Band-4

Testing is an essential part of teaching. Successful testing is not only a way of measuring the students'language proficiency but also a channel of providing feedback for teachers. Among the five basic skills of English language learning, the cultivation of reading ability always plays an imperative role, so how to improve students reading ability is the common concern of researchers and English teachers, at the same time, how to test students'reading ability in a scientific and reasonable way is also the topic of research recently.Based on the theoretical researches on historical development of language testing as well as some key concepts in the field of language testing, it is found that the tendency of language test is communicative test and a good test is the one that exploits merits of the four main approaches to testing, especially of the most advanced one--communicative testing, and besides, a good test can reach high validity, high reliability, beneficial backwash, appropriate practicality and certain discrimination as well.The modern society needs people with communicative competence, and college English teaching also has transited from the traditional teaching to communicative teaching in an efficient way .However, it turns out that the most influential and the largest scale language test College English Test (CET Band-4 for short), to some extent, still remains in the second period of language testing, that is, the structuralist approach. However, with the increasing popularity of CET Band-4 in China, it is not only an achievement test, but has developed into a test that can test the students'ability of application, a proficiency test. The research reported in this thesis is concerned with testing of reading for CET Band -4. It is found that reading is a communicative and interactive process in nature, and CET Band-4, as an achievement-proficiency test, some disadvantages still exist in the current reading test, such as: limited genres and topics; lack of real-life reading materials; confined reading skills ; limited testing techniques; uniform formats. All of those above stated reasons call for communicative testing; thereby it is necessary that the reading part of CET Band -4 should take a communicative testing approach.To verify whether the communicative reading tasks can be more beneficial to candidates, the author carried out an experiment among 210 students of two classes. The experimental class was given communicative reading tasks every two weeks, whereas the control class was given regular reading exercises that were typical of the current CET Band-4 reading task. After this kind of distinctive reading training for one semester, the students from the experimental class, compared with those from the control class, demonstrated a better reading ability in addition to a higher motivation in English learning through reading. Then, a questionnaire survey and interview among 300 college students were carried out; it is found that the current CET Band-4 reading test does exert certain harmful backwash effect upon learning and teaching of college English.Based on the findings, the author proposes some suggestions on the current CET Band-4 reading test. First, in the selection of the reading materials, text genres can be enriched, and some authentic formats of texts, such as titles, typesetting and illustrations, can be kept. Second, in the design of the reading tasks, real-life reading purposes are proposed to be established especially for some practical genres, and testing techniques should be diversified. So, the communicative reading test should bear the five features: 1) choosing a variety of genres and topics; 2) establishing real-life materials; 3) testing different reading skills; 4) adopting diverse testing techniques; 5) keeping or mimicking authentic formats. Thus, CET Band-4 can make a greater contribution to the advance of the English teaching and learning in China.However, it should be admitted that due to the author's limited knowledge and energy, the hypothesis of this thesis only verified in a small scale. But as to such a large scale, national CET Band-4, the practicability of the reform suggestions still need exploring and verifying.