Application Of Communicative Language Testing Theory To College English Test Band Four Writing Test

In the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) of English language, the cultivation of the writing ability is indispensable. And how to enhance students'English writing ability has been the popular topic among some researchers and English teachers for a long time. In order to inquire the ways to improve students'English writing ability from different perspectives, many teachers, scholars and experts have written numerous books and articles,carried out a lot of related researches, and some achievements have been made. At the same time, how to make English writing test more scientific has been one of the focuses of researchers in recent years.With the development of the theory of behaviorism and the theory of learning in linguistics, traditional methods have given the way to communicative ones in the English teaching in many universities. However, the change of College English Test Band-4 (CET-4) is not obviously seen. As an influential nation-wide test, CET-4 has made a positive contribution to college English teaching and learning. However, its writing test has been criticized over the years in terms of the type of the task, the way of constructing test rubrics, and the constitution of the rating scale.Based on the review of related concepts and the development of language testing, it is found that communicative test is the tendency in the field of language testing; and a good communicative writing test should possess the following characteristics: (1) authentic and integrated context; (2) diverse and proper style and register; (3) information-gapped, interactive and motivating content; (4) need analysis; (5) a set of rating scale based on communicative competence.First, a few writing tasks were designed according to the communicative testing theory. To evaluate appropriately the communicative writing ability of candidates, a new set of analytical rating scale wad put forward by fully considering the theory of Bachman's communicative competence and the rating scales of International English Language Test System (IELTS) and the Test in English for Educational Purposes (TEEP).In order to testify whether the communicative writing test could be more beneficial to candidates, an experiment which lasted for one semester among 120 students of two classes was conducted. The experimental class was given communicative writing tasks every two weeks, whereas the control class was exposed to the typical writing tasks of the current CET-4. The data collected from the experiment demonstrate that the subjects in the experimental class score much higher in the communicative writing tasks than those in the control class in the traditional writing tasks. Furthermore, scores obtained by the subjects in the experimental class in post-experiment test are higher than those they got in in-experiment test. The results of the interviews also show that the majority of the subjects hold a favorable attitude towards the communicative writing test. Based on the statistical analysis and empirical study, some implications are made on the current CET-4 writing test and college English writing teaching.The results of the present research are expected to provide valuable implications for college English writing teaching and the reform of CET-4 writing test.