A Study Of The Washback Of Listening Test Of NMET On Test-takers’ Listening Learning Strategy

National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is designed to assess whether test-taker iscapable to have further education in university. In2011, more than9.33million test-takershad taken the NMET and0.59million test-takers had taken the NMET in Shandong Province.As a high risk nationwide matriculation test, NMET has been playing an important role inhigh school English education in China. So far, there are a lot of researches about thewashback study of the NMET, however, these researchers mainly focus on the washback ofNMET on teaching method, teaching and learning attitude, teaching materials but there islittle research about the washback of NMET on learner’s listening strategy. Therefore, thewriter of this thesis decide to carry out this study to explore the washback of NMET ontest-takers’ English Listening Learning Strategy (ELLS).In order to find out the washback of NMET on test-takers’ ELLS, the writer raise thefollowing two questions:1) what’s kind of ELLS test-taker used in the preparation of theNMET listening test?2) Is there significant difference of using frequency of ELLS betweengrade one students and grade three students? The writer hypothesis that the difference ofELLS using frequency between grade one students and grade three students can be used toexplain the intensity of washback on test-takers’ English listening learning strategy. Inresponse to the researching questions, the writer put forward an empirical study among276high school students in4schools of4cities in Shandong Province. The ELSQ (EnglishListening Strategy Questionnaire), Factor Analysis, interview and NMET mock paper areused to elicit the strategies that applied by the test-takers in the learning of English listeningto answer the first question. The T-test and Correlation Analysis of SPSS are used to analyzethe difference of ELLS using frequency among test-takers to answer the second question.The result of this study shows that there is significant difference of ELLS usingfrequency between grade one students and grade three students. Grade three students use theELLS more frequent than grade one students, which explains the hypothesis that NMETlistening test has significant washback on the using range of ELLS. In addition, the result also shows that there is significant correlation between the using frequencies of most of listeningstrategies (cognitive strategy, memory strategy and social strategy) and the score oftest-takers’ listening mock paper. The result also shows that the mean of using frequency ofsocial strategy of test-takers is not high which is not same with the idea of communicativeapproach. Therefore, students of high school should be encouraged to have morecommunication between teachers and classmates in the learning of English listening course.