On Specialized English Testing

Specialized English testing belongs to testing language for specific purpose (LSP) which is a special case of communicative language testing (CLT). Specialized English testing is new and underway in china. There are many problems to be explored in this field.The thesis"On Specialized English Testing-How to Design a Specialized English Reading and Writing Test for Business Administration Undergraduates(SERWTBAU)"explores the methods on specialized English testing. The focus of the study is how to design the specialized English reading and writing test for business administration undergraduates (SERWTBAU).In order to administer the present study, 36 undergraduates from Business Administration department in Yibin College are chosen by the researcher to receive specialized English reading and writing training which lasts one semester. During the training, communicative approach to language teaching is adopted. Teaching contents are based on needs analysis. After the training, the researcher administers the SERWTBAU.The researcher identifies the target language use (TLU) tasks by questionnaire survey, observation and interview. In addition, subject specialist informants are involved. Based on the identified TLU tasks, test specification and test paper are developed. The researcher adopts two scorers and two different criteria to score undergraduates'response for reducing errors. Besides, subject specialist informants provide referenced answers for the SERWTBAU so as to better the interpretation of test scores. Piloting is conducted after test paper development. Quality assessment is presented from the six qualities that required by communicative testing.The major findings of the present study are briefly summarized as follows:First, the TLU tasks in the SERWTBAU are reading reporting and writing analytic reports, reading information, notices, and advertisements of activities or products and writing notices, public information, memos or notes about them, reading journals or magazines, reading charts, pictures or data analyses.Second, a test specification as well as a sample test paper is developed which includes specific purposes of the SERWTBAU, list of types of tasks in the TLU domain, characteristics of test takers, construct to be measured, content of the test, scoring, plan for evaluation.Third, The SERWTBAU has relatively high construct validity, reliability and practicality.Based on the research, a tentative test development model aiming at Business Administration undergraduates is presented as a reference for LSP testing designer.