A Comparative Study Of CET-6Compound Dictation And TEM4Dictation

CET (College English Test) and TEM (Test for English Majors) are twooverwhelmingly influential tests to assess college students’ English proficiency. Inboth tests, dictation as one type of test task is adopted in different forms as animportant constituent of listening comprehension, which is generally recognized as adifficult part by the test takers. The present study makes efforts to explore andcontrast the dictation tasks in CET-6and TEM4. Through the qualitative analysis ofthe texts of dictations and the quantitative analysis of the experimental data, the studyhopes to find out the differences in difficulty level of the dictations tasks in the twotests.Based on Bachman’s framework of TMF (Test Method Facets), a workingframework for analysis of task characteristics is proposed to make a contrastive studyof the dictation tasks selected from the test papers of CET-6and TEM4administeredfrom2006to2010from the perspectives of the task construct, lexical difficulty,syntactic complexity, readability and topical areas. The major findings of the contentanalysis are: compared with CET-6, the passages in TEM-4dictation are shorter inlength, read at a slower speech rate, and easier in terms of lexical difficulty andsyntactic complexity.Research instruments used in this study also include dictation tasks fromauthentic CET-6and TEM4test papers and one questionnaire. Sixty sophomoreEnglish major students from the School of Foreign Languages of Tongji Universityand forty sophomore English major students from East China University of Scienceand Technology are chosen as the sample subjects, who are required to take thedictation test within a certain period of time. After that, they are asked to complete aquestionnaire survey. Then the data are collected and analyzed by the author.The quantitative analysis of the test scores shows that the mean score on TEM4dictation is significantly lower than that on CET-6compound dictation. Furthermore,compared with TEM4dictation, CET-6compound dictation is more discriminative. The scores of these two dictation tasks are highly correlated. Besides, the results ofquestionnaire survey display the sample subjects’ preference towards TEM4dictationas English majors.The research is meaningful in that it provides an insight into the differences oftest content and task characteristics of the dictation tasks in CET-6and TEM4as wellas the differences of their difficulty level, which will be helpful, to some extent, forthe designing of the dictation tasks.