The Comparative Studies Between CET Writing And TOEFL Writing

College English Test (CET) is a wide and influential examination. There arethousands of students taking part in CET, so it has played an important role in thepromotion of English teaching and learning. But many scholars have found that thereare many problems in the writing subtest in terms of task design, scoring criterion,scoring method, length requirements, etc. For quite a long time, college students’writing ability has not improved a lot in the performance of CET writing. There aremany reasons accounting for this, but an important reason should be the irrationaldesign of the test of CET writing.The purpose of the writing test is to improve students’ ability to use language,while the stereotyped test format and rigid scoring criterion of traditional CET writingtests have not improved students’ language ability effectively. In order to bring aboutsome changes, there are some scholars and researchers making efforts to put forwardsome suggestions. However, no significant changes have been made until now.According to College English Syllabus, the final aim of language teaching isto enhance students’ communicative competence. Therefore, in this thesis, the authortries to apply communicative language testing theory to CET writing subtest. TOEFLwriting is a typical and successful practice of communicative testing theory. Throughthe comparative studies between TOEFL writing and CET writing, the author finallydesigns a new communicative scoring criterion combining holistic scale andanalytical scale. The holistic scoring method is admitted by its high speed. It isreasonable to apply this method in such large-scale test as CET writing,but it is toogeneral. While the analytical scoring method is more detailed and could evaluate the essay comprehensively. Therefore, this new scoring method not only retains itsprevious holistic scale but also adopts the analytical scale. The analytical scaleassesses the students’ integrated abilities from five aspects: structure, content,argumentation, language accuracy and language variety. The combination of these twomethods could guarantee the reliability and validity of scoring. Meanwhile, thisresearch also provides some valuable suggestions in terms of task design, test format,writing instructions.In this thesis, the author first gives a brief introduction of TOEFL writing andCET writing, and then by reviewing the relevant research, she puts forward the theoryof communicative language testing，talking about the characteristics and principles ofcommunicative language testing theory. Subsequently the author talks about thecomparative studies on CET writing and TOEFL writing. She conducts a qualitativeresearch mainly from three aspects of test format, scoring criterion and scoringmethod. The results show that there exist many problems in CET writing. In order tofurther compare the differences between the TOEFL writing and CET writing, theauthor invites two foreign teachers and three Chinese teachers from Ocean Universityof China to have a re-evaluation for the sample essays according to the scoringcriterion of TOEFL writing. These samples are provided by CET testing committee. Itproves that CET writing does have many disadvantages. Based on these problems, theauthor borrows some idea from TOEFL writing from the perspective ofcommunicative language testing theory and finally gives some implications andsuggestions.This research aims to bring about a new perspective on how to applycommunicative language testing theory to CET writing test. It is expected to exertgood backwash effects on the teaching and learning of writing.