In Junior High School English Test Reliability Study

The assessment of students' spoken English is an important part of evaluation for English teaching. The testing of students' spoken English can bring in a positive washback for English teaching, for it can promote students' comprehensive ability development, therefore it is imperative to evaluate students' spoken English ability.Spoken English testing can, in an effective way, examine and evaluate students' competence of using oral English with high validity. But the assessments for students' spoken English are mainly from scorers subjective judgments, so the discrepancy of scorers' professional skills, testing experiences and personality inevitably influence the their judgments, reflected on the examinee's scores. It is very difficult for the scorers to reach an absolute agreement in grasping the evaluation standard.This thesis expounded the foundations of "Spoken English Testing Reliability" and the whole process of the research and practice, carried out in a district in Nanjing, on promoting scorer reliability of spoken English testing in junior schools. It elaborated on the factors affecting the scorer reliability and presented methods and ways of enhancing scorer reliability of spoken English testing for future research. The validity of the methods in the research was verified with the correlation coefficient between spoken and written test scores, Cronbach reliability coefficient and the portion of agreement in scoring.