The Content Validity Of The Reading Comprehension Sub-tests Of Shaanxi NMET (2006-2010)

As one of the most important national tests in China, NMT (National Matriculation Test) plays a significant role in screening and selection. It has been five years since Shaanxi began its NMET (National Matriculation English Test) independent proposition in 2006. However, compared with other provinces and cities in China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and so on, the reform process of NMET in Shaanxi province is rather slow and many problems are still to be solved. NMET paper reflects the detailed information of NMET reform from all aspects and it is an important material for language testing studies and researches. The studies and researches of NMET paper may help the test designers and English teachers to know exactly the present situation of NMET reform and guide the future NMET reform and high school English teaching.NMET mainly focuses on examining the four fundamental skills of English learning such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. Reading testing is an integral part of NMET and its item types are stable with mainly objective items which have been slightly reformed during these years. In the language testing field, a successfully reformed test requires consideration of elements from varied aspects such as reliability, validity, discriminability, difficulty and so on. Among these elements, validity is a key element to be considered in language testing. In fact, validity can be classified into various kinds such as face validity, content validity, predictive validity, concurrent validity and so on.This study primarily examines the content validity of NMET reading comprehension tests during the past five years from 2006 to 2010. Based on Bachman's task feature framework, a new framework is formed in this study based on the distinct properties of NMET by the author and five kinds of features of NMET reading comprehension tests during past five years including test environment, test specification, test input, test responses and the relationship between the input and responses are analysed in the content validity study respectively. After the content validity study, some principles and methods of the content validity control are put forward in order to provide some suggestions for the future proposition of NMET in Shaanxi Province. At last, the implications and limitations are presented. Since the studies about the content validity of NMET reading comprehension tests are rare, this study will shed some light on the reform of NMET reading comprehension test in Shaanxi Province in the future.