A Critical Analysis And Evaluation Of CET Writing Subtests From The Perspective Of Communicative Language Testing And Their Implications For The Writing Subtests Design

As a large-scale and influential national test, CET has contributed a great deal to improving the effectiveness of college English teaching and learning. However, its writing subtests have been criticized over the years due to its rigid test format, monotonous test types, and simplified scoring criteria.Meanwhile, students' writing performance in the writing subtests of CET has not been improved much for a long time. The writing subtest itself and its negative backwash on the teaching of writing should account for this. In order to bring about some changes to such a stagnant situation, researchers at home and abroad have proposed suggestions in revising either the way of constructing the task and test rubrics, or the constitution of the marking scale. But until now no significant breakthrough has been made due to a lack of revolutionary changes to the nature of the subtests. This research tries to integrate all aspects concerning writing subtests and propose some suggestions to make CET writing subtests communicative.As one of the attempts to improve Chinese non-English major college students' writing ability, this research is undertaken to illustrate the importance of the communicative language testing theory in writing tasks design in exerting a more positive influence on teaching and testing of college English writing.This research first gives an introduction to CET writing subtests, and then reviews the literature of the relevant research followed by the evaluation of the CET writing test from the perspective of correlation coefficients with the whole test, the authenticity and content validity of the writing subtests and consideration for marking as well as the presentation of problems solved and to be solved. Then it introduces the communicative language testing theory to great length and applies it into the CET writing subtests and thus puts forward some implications and suggested communicative language testing of writing. In the end, it substantiates the conclusion.It is hoped that the present research may provide valuable implications and useful guidance for syllabus design, course design, college English writing instruction and assessment, and the reform of CET Writing subtests. The suggested CET writing subtests in this thesis was expected to exert good backwash effects on the teaching and learning of writing. Hopefully it would lead to the improvement of the students' communicative performance in the writing and make them better equipped for the later real-life communication writing activities.