A Comparative Study Of Reading Tests In TEM8 And IELTS

Reading is considered to be an important skill in our daily life and work. For most second or foreign language leamers, the study opportunity through face-to-face conununication with target language speakers is largely confined, so the most convenient way for them is to read in target language. In many English language tests, reading comprehension part covers very large proportion of the whole, which refleets its significance. Therefore, designing the good reading comprehension part is a crucial aspect of insuring the sueeessful testing.The Test for English Majors Grade 8 (TEM8) is a large-scale nationwide criterion-referenced test for English majors in China. IELTS is the acronym of The International English Language Testing System, it is widely recognised as a reliable means of assesing the language ability of candidates who need to study or work where English is the language of communication. These two tests have a great influence in our country, however, there is little research on the comparison of the reading tests in TEM8 and IELTS.This paper aims to make a comparative analysis on the content validity, instrument-related reliability, and parallel or alternate forms reliability of the reading tests in TEM8 and IELTS. The writer has collected 4 latest and consecutive versions of reading tests in each of TEM8 and IELTS, thus making up altogether 8 versions of reading tests, within which 28 reading texts are involved. Based on Bachman's framework of task characteristics, the writer has proposed a new framework for the assessment of reading tests, and made the analysis from two aspects—the analysis of critical characteristics of reading texts and the analysis of critical features of reading questions, and a detailed discussion is proceeded on the basis of the data obtained from the analysis.The study shows that, in terms of content validity: 1) reading tests of IELTS provide texts with more authentic forms and greater length than TEM8; 2) reading texts in the two tests are close in sentence length, percentage of long words and readability (according to Gunning Fox Index); 3) a majority of reading texts in TEM8 are concerned with only social sciences topics while reading texts in IELTS are more evenly distributed among a variety of topics; 4) TEM8 and IELTS both prefer macro-level testing points to micro-level ones, but IELTS is more macro-level than TEM8. In terms of instrument-related reliability, and parallel forms reliability: 1) IELTS has done a better job than TEM8 in terms of consistency in the requirement of reading speededness; 2) average sentence length and readability of reading texts are more stable in IELTS than in TEM8; 3) IELTS does better in providing reading questions in a variety of formats and has a relatively low probability of correct guessing on the part of test-takers than TEM8, thus IELTS is more instrumentally reliable than TEM8.It is expected that from these major findings based on concrete data a great deal of implications can be drawn for TEM8 test designers concerning the improvement of the quality of the reading tests, and for English teachers, learners and prospective test-takers.