Interactiveness Of Cet-6 Listening Test

Interactiveness is an important quality that a valid test is supposed to possess. It refers to the degree and type of involvement of the testtakers'individual characteristics in completing a test task. Based on Bachman & Palmer's (1996) model of interactiveness, this study tentatively examined the interactiveness quality of CET-6 listening test (based on the MC part), to see whether the interactiveness of CET-6 listening test in the four components of testtakers'characteristics (language knowledge, strategic competence, topical knowledge and affective schemata) reach the acceptable levels.The whole research can be divided into two steps.First, the test task characteristics of CET-6 listening tests were analyzed and assessed to make the logical evaluation on its suitability to the testtakers. In this step, four authentic listening test papers of CET-6 in recent two years (2007—2008) were carefully examined and evaluated through the framework of language task characteristics and the checklist for evaluating usefulness proposed by Bachman & Palmer (1996).Second, a post-test questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate testtakers' perceptions of their degrees of involvement of language knowledge, strategic competence, topical knowledge, affective schemata in CET-6 listening test-taking process. The subjects were an existing class of 74 undergraduate non-English majors in South West Jiaotong University (SWJTU). The instruments were a CET-6 listening test (the MC part of the test paper of June 2007) and a self-designed questionnaire. The test was held in a multi-media language lab. Right after the listening test, the questionnaire survey was administered.57 questionnaires proved to be valid. The data was stored into SPSS 13.0 documents for statistical analyses. Reliability Analysis and Descriptive statistics were the main techniques used to explore the details of testtakers'perceptions of the degrees of the four types of involvement in CET-6 listening test.The results are summarized as follows:First, the test task characteristics of CET-6 listening test generally correspond with its target testtakers'characteristics in language knowledge, strategic competence, topical knowledge and affective schemata, and hence build a useful foundation for the interaction of testtakers with the CET-6 listening test task.Second, however, the expected interactivenesses of CET-6 listening test in the four components (language knowledge, strategy competence, topical knowledge, affective response) are not equally achieved. The interactiveness of CET-6 listening test in the aspect of language knowledge is lower than the test should assume. It is only limited to the moderate range, instead of a high level. The interactivenesses in the components of strategic competence, topical knowledge and positive affective schemata reach the minimum acceptable moderate levels whereas there still are some rooms for improvement.Based on the results of the present study, it is revealed that the interactiveness of CET-6 listening test couldn't meet the requirements of its purpose which may, to some extent, threaten its construct validity. To improve the interactiveness of CET-6 listening test, test developers are suggested to include more authentic spoken language in text input and more items of measuring sociolinguistic knowledge; besides, testtakers'interest on text topics and test formats should be further investigated and considered in the test designing.As a practice on the interactiveness theory of Bachman and Palmer (1996), the present study has proved the importance of test interactiveness as an essential test quality. Moreover, it has some practical implications for improving the useful quality of CET-6 and other language tests.