| In the autumn of 2004, more than 1,000 high schools in 21 cities in Guangdong Province began to administrate the new curriculum innovation, and Guangdong Province had become one of the first four provinces on the national new curriculum experimental implementation. In 2007, the first entrance examination to college was administrated after the new curriculum reform in Guangdong. According to the requirements and outlines of the English Curriculum Standards (experimental) for Senior Secondary Schools (2003)(hereinafter referred to as the"New Curriculum Standards"and the English Testing Syllabus in 2007, great changes have taken place on the paper structure and testing scale, among which, the matching test in reading part is newly added, the reading time has decreased from 35 minutes to 25 minutes, and reading materials reduced from five passages to four passages, the question items for each article increased from 4 to 5 questions, however, the scoring, accounting for 27% of the whole Paper, has not changed, thus, the reading part is always an important factor affecting testing performance in Matriculation English Tests of Guangdong Province (GDMET).Based on the requirements on English Curriculum for Senior Secondary Middle Schools (experimental and revised edition) issued in 2000(hereinafter referred to as the"Teaching Syllabus"and the New Curriculum Standards, the present study explores the characteristics and content validity of GDMET Paper from 2004 to 2010 firstly from the point of psychometric properties, then in light of Bachman and Palmer's (1999) framework of task characteristics, and finally making surveys on teachers.The major findings of the present study are briefly summarized as follows:First, after analyzing the psychometric properties (including basic data comparison, facility value, discrimination index) of the reading tests of 2004 (before innovation) and 2007 (after innovation), the results show although there are significant differences on students'performance from the reading parts in 2004 and 2007, the psychometric properties are generally satisfactory in technical sense, the item difficulty and discrimination in the two years all achieve a high reasonable degree, and most of the items could distinguish the candidates of different levels. Consistency and stability across the two reading tests are maintained to measure the candidates'language proficiency. Second, most characteristics of reading passages in GDMET papers meet the requirements of the corresponding teaching and testing syllabuses. For example, the reading passages employ the text type with the features of extensiveness, cover a very large range of topics and reading skills, the reading materials are selected with appropriate difficulty, the length of reading articles and reading speed are designed reasonably and appropriately.Third, the teachers'survey shows that the overwhelming majority of teachers have positive attitudes to the change of reading test formats, time and score allocation. Also, a great number of teachers feel both the new reading comprehension and matching test are either an excellent or a good measure of the reading proficiency.Four, the changes in reading comprehension tests before and after innovation display the philosophy of"smooth and stable transition"from the Teaching Syllabus to the New Curriculum Standards. Relatively speaking, the topics selected after innovation are broader, genres prefer to the argumentative and expository texts, the number of articles with simple narration decreases, the number of passages with tight top-level rhetorical organization increases, the requirements on the passage length and reading speed improve to a great extent, more importance is attached to the testing of candidates'judgmental ability.However, the research also finds some problems, e.g. the discrimination levels of some items are poor for the reading comprehension both in 2004 and in 2007, and the difficulty level of the matching tests in some years need to be improved.
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