| CET-4 (College English Test band 4), as a national standardized test for non-English major students in China, intending to evaluate students'English proficiency, has exerted its great influence. However, with the development of testing approaches, the drawbacks of the old CET-4, that is, the ineffectiveness in testing students'communicative ability, especially the ability to listen and speak have been prominent; therefore the reform of CET-4 then is taking shape. Since listening, the most frequently used language skill, plays a very important part in our daily communication and educational process, I try in this paper to pitch into the listening comprehension part of CET-4 to gain some insights into the current reform in listening subtest of CET-4.In this dissertation, I first reviewed some theoretical analysis of language teaching and testing, and basic considerations for testing of listening comprehension, especially the communicative listening test—whose famous specimen is IELTS. After that, in order to enhance the reliability and validity of the present research, both quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed. A contrastive analysis of the performance among the three listening subtests of CET-4 in June, 2002 and in June, 2006, and IELTS is made, together with a post-test questionnaire and interviews. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that the listening subtest of the new CET-4 is much closer to that of IELTS, i.e. is much closer to the communicative listening test, and also can more demonstrate students'communicative language competence and exert more positive washback effects on college English teaching, learning and testing. Though some potential problems still exist to be solved, it is hoped that the findings and suggestions in the present research will contribute to the reform in CET-4 listening subtest so as to enhance students'communicative language competence and finally promote the college English education in China.
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