A Study On The Authenticity Of Senior Three Students' English Writing Test Task

Writing is a very important language skill for communication, especially for senior three middle school students. Senior three writing test is used as a means to assess to what extent students have mastered the course content, which aims to provide feedback information and then enhance further teaching and learning. In the field of language test, authenticity is regarded as one of the most important qualities determining the overall usefulness of a test. Therefore, it is worth exploring that to what degree the senior three writing test has its authenticity. However, it has been found that the researches on authenticity domestic are mainly conducted on TEM4 and TEM8 about listening or oral test. Quite few studies have been carried out to explore the authenticity of writing test task, no less than senior three writing test task.Based on the situation mentioned above, the thesis attempts to probe into the authenticity of the senior three writing test task, which aims to answer the following question:In terms of the input characteristics, to what extent does the final writing test task has its authenticity?The samples in the study include several pieces of senior three writing test items of English test papers from Xi'an middle schools selected at random and University Entrance Examination writing test items. The methodology involved in the study is mainly deductive way, which aims to respectively describe the input characteristics of senior three writing test tasks and TLU tasks, on the basis of the framework of task characteristics proposed by Bachman and Palmer. In addition, the quantitative method is adopted in the research. The information of subcategories that are included in the description of input characteristics will be analyzed. The differential values will be obtained to decide the degree of the input authenticity.The findings from the research are drawn as follows:Generally speaking, the final writing test has comparatively high authenticity, in terms of the input characteristics, which is based on the following findings:1) The senior three writing test task has high authenticity in terms of input format; 2) The senior three writing test task has very high authenticity in terms of vocabulary; 3) The senior three writing test task has high authenticity in terms of syntax; 4) The senior three writing test task has very high authenticity in terms of graphology; 5) The senior three writing test task has comparatively high authenticity in terms of cohesive devices; 6) The senior three writing test task has comparatively high authenticity in terms of functional characteristics; 7) The senior three writing test task has very high authenticity in terms of figurative characteristics.Although the study may offer some implications to the students and teachers who are involved in learning and teaching writing, as well as test designers, there are still a lot of limitations, like the small size of the samples, which needs to be further improved.