An Analysis Of The Testing Of Vocabulary And Structure In School Achievement Tests

The test formats of vocabulary and structure have been a hot issue during recent years and have aroused much attention of the language test designers and researchers. CET-4 and TOEFL have canceled the independent vocabulary and structure part, mainly because the validity of the vocabulary and structure part, compared with that of other parts, is not very high and suspected by testing experts home and abroad. However, the vocabulary and structure part, with its own advantage, still exist in many large-scale tests, such as NMET and TEM-4. This thesis aims to find out whether the vocabulary and structure part has beneficial backwash on language learning and teaching, whether it should exist in the school achievement test, and what suggestions can be given on the test formats of vocabulary and structure.The thesis analyses the perspective and attitude from both students and teachers through questionnaires and selects the recent two achievement tests as the research objective to analyze the reliability, validity, difficulty and discrimination of the vocabulary and structure part and get the relevant results.The research indicates that both teachers and students hold positive attitude toward the vocabulary and structure part in school achievement tests. They believe that it can test students' language ability and suggest keeping it. At the same time, the research also shows that a good few students and teachers hope to reduce the item number in that part and introduce more test formats to test vocabulary and structure. In addition, some items' quality is not very satisfactory, which needs to be improved in the future.