A Study On The Validity Of The Listening Subtest In New CET-4--From The Perspective Of Communicative Language Testing

The theoretical basis of communicative language testing is the theory of communicative language ability.The concept of communicative competence was first raised by Hymes.According to Hymes,communicative competence contains four aspects: whether something is possible;whether something is feasible;whether something is appropriate in context;whether something is actually performed.Based on Hymes' theory,in 1980,Canale and Swain have further divided communicative competence into linguistic competence,sociolinguistic competence,discourse competence and strategic competence.The latest development of the communicative competence is Bachman's framework of communicative language ability.In the early 1990s,Bachman proposed his framework of communicative language ability.In this framework,communicative language ability consists of both knowledge,or competence,and the capacity for implementing or executing that competence in appropriate,contextualized communicative language use.It is composed of three components:language competence, strategic competence,and psychophysiological mechanisms.As the theory of communicative competence is widely accepted and adopted in foreign language teaching,the communicative testing system which aims to test the communicative competence of language learner is developed.A communicative competence-oriented test aims to check the learner's ability to communicate and exchange information with others.In a communicative competence-oriented test,both the accuracy of the language form and the appropriateness of the language use in a specific context are assessed.Based on his framework of communicative language ability,Bachman further proposed six qualities that should be contained in a communicative test.They are: reliability,construct validity,authenticity,interactiveness,practicality and impact.The purpose of a language test is to obtain feedbacks from the students,to know how much knowledge they have grasped through learning.A test is said to have validity if it checks what it intended to check.So,to judge whether a test is well designed,the validity is the most important criteria.As a large scale standardized test,the CET-4 has undergone great reform since 2007. The reform of CET-4 indicates two tendencies of the future's college English teaching, i.e.communicative teaching and testing system would be applied to teach and check the students' communicative language ability;the students' ability in listening and speaking should be strengthened to meet the needs in cross-cultural communications. As a test with a great number of participants and huge impact in China,the reform of CET-4 would definitely place a great influence on English teaching in China.As a result, the validity of this test and its washback effect on cultivating students' listening and speaking ability are worthy of investigation.Based on the theories concerning with the major qualities in a communicative test, this research aims to have an investigation on the validity of CET-4 listening test through the analysis of its testing items and material.The research methods that are used in the investigation include material analysis,questionnaire survey and testing.The results of this research can be summarized as follows:Firstly,new CET-4 listening subtest has the quality of reliability.It is comparatively reliable with regard to the effect of testing environment on the test result.What's more, through the analysis of the correlation between the scores that the same student got from different CET-4 listening subtests,it is found that the reliability of this subtest is relatively high.Secondly,the seven listening skills tested in this subtest can be categorized into four competences:grammatical competence,textual competence,illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence and these competences all together forms language competence in Bachman's framework of communicative language ability.Through inter-correlation analysis,we find that different part in the subtest checks different language abilities relate to listening.Thirdly,CET-4 listening subtest has reasonable and acceptable level of authenticity on the whole.The materials that are chosen in the test cover various ranges of the target language use domain.Some task types are suitable for a communicative test.Fourthly,CET-4 listening subtest lays positive impact on test users both in language teaching and learning on the whole.Students improve their communicative listening ability in some extent through the preparation of the test,while teachers' teaching objective and teaching content are adjusted according to the test.The results of the research show that the listening subtest in new CET-4 bears comparatively high validity.It has the major test qualities that are necessary in a communicative test,and thus can reflect the learner's communicative language ability in a relatively well-rounded way.However,some shortcomings also exist in the test design and should be improved later on.For example,its input is not authentic in some aspects; the types of test items are limited.