Test Research: The Relation Between TEM4 And Teaching Syllabus

The scope for Test for English Majors Band Four (TEM4) is the skill of listening, reading, and writing, and the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary prescribed in the Teaching Syllabus. The first purpose of TEM4 is to see whether the students meet the requirement prescribed in the Teaching Syllabus for English Majors in Colleges and Universities (TSEM) after their junior stage of studying English in college or university and the second purpose of TEM4 is to check the students'comprehensive ability of using all kinds of skills and their degree of mastering grammar structure and vocabulary usage.Once a year, TEM4 is held at fourth term among English Majors.The history of TEM4 starts from 1991, the test has been held 16 times until 2006. Though some research papers which study the quality of TEM4 can be found, by far little has been done about the relation between the TEM4 and the TSEM. This article is an attempt to find out the quality of TEM4 mainly by investigating the relation between TEM4 and TSEM. That is to study the content validity of TEM4. The samples of this research are TEM4 test papers in 2005 and 2006. The tests in these two years are under the control of Syllabus for TEM4 edited in 2004. The test items come from A Guide to TEM4 (fifth edition). Bachman's theory framework Test Method Facet (TMF) is adopted in this article.To further study the quality of TEM4, a questionnaire is designed to investigate face validity of TEM4 (2005 and 2006). The sample subjects are Grade 2003 and Grade 2004 students in School of Foreign Language, Guangzhou University. They took part in TEM4 in 2005 and 2006 respectively.The research question in this paper is: What is the relation between TEM4 and the Teaching Syllabus? In this research, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used.This study indicates that the difficulty of TEM4 is appropriate. The test items are under the control of the Teaching Syllabus. This study also finds some disadvantage of TEM4 and gives suggestion to improve the quality of TEM4. The significance of this study is that it is helpful to improve the quality of TEM4 in the coming years by finding out the content validity of TEM4 (2005 and 2006).