An Empirical Investigation Into The Validity Of The National Professional English Tests In China

Since 1978, there have been increasingly frequent international co-operations and exchanges between China and foreign countries, and China has paid more and more attention to English teaching and learning. In 1999, the Chinese government introduced the National Professional English Tests (NPETS) and professionals in various fields are required to take the tests for the purpose of promotion in technical posts. For such nationwide tests that are used for making important decisions about large numbers of individuals, investigation into the usefulness of the measurement is of great significance not only for individual test takers, user-institutions, but for the whole society as well.The NPETS, grouped into broad discipline areas (recently 3), are intended to challenge professionals to become proficient in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) reading, thus making it necessary to review the literature regarding ESP testing and reading assessment first. In addition, the current investigation into the test usefulness has inevitably involved the review of the literature concerning the test qualities, especially the two chief criteria─validity and reliability. The literature review provides a sound theoretical base for the empirical study to evaluate the validity of the NPETS.The present thesis chose the Level-B tests to represent all the three levels, and identified the ST (science, engineering and technology) and ML (medical and life sciences) areas for the investigation. The study concerns the test conditions under which reading activities should be carried out and pays special attention to text type, text length, rhetorical organization, topic familiarity, subject specificity, task type, response type and the reading skills to be tested. A questionnaire survey was carried out among the 2006 Level-B test takers from the two discipline areas in Zhenjiang in order to investigate the actual reading needs. At the same time, the 2003, 2004, and 2005 corresponding test papers were analyzed in order to offer insight into the design of the 2006 test papers, which is not available until the end of 2006. Based on the results of the needs analysis and the test paper analysis, the thesis has gathered evidence for both reliability and validity, from which a conclusion has been drawn that the existing NPETS have questionable validity and hence doubtful usefulness. Some tentative recommendations have been presented for the purpose of enhancing validity to the highest possible level, and increasing reliability as well to achieve an appropriate balance between the two qualities.The attempt to validate the NPETS has shed some light on how the tests should be developed so that they have the potential to provide usable information on people's ability to use English in their real-life target situations, and this initial research will certainly bring about more in-depth and further research.