Backwash Effect Of The Phonetic Question Items In The NMET (Shaanxi Province) On High School Phonetic Teaching

Backwash effect refers to the impact of test on teaching and learning, which has drawn the attention of many scholars and educators in1990s. They in both theory and practice have done a great deal of research on it, which has greatly helped to enrich test theories and promoted the development of language teaching and learning. However, the studies on backwash in China are relatively rare in the aspects of both theory and practice.The NMET, as a high-stake test, exerts tremendous influence on many aspects of English education,"but our understanding of the role of high-stake tests as an agent for change is limited due to the small number of empirical studies available on this issue,"(Qi Liuxia:2007), particularly to the little study on specific question items in the NMET. The author of this thesis intends to exam the actual impacts of the phonetic question type in the NMET of Shaanxi Province on high school phonetic teaching, in hoping to find out the positive changes through its development and the challenges it faces, and to explore some approaches to improving this question type and reforming high school English phonetic teaching.This study takes such instruments as interview, classroom observation and questionnaires, all of which were carried out among80high school English teachers and519high school students, as well as80first year college students from two universities. Meanwhile, the present research has also studied three samples of the authentic phonetic items in the NMET (Shaanxi Province) from2009to2011. The present study spanned from March2011to May2012.The study aims to address the following questions:1) Can the students’answers to the phonetic items in the NMET reflect their pronunciation competence comprehensively?2) Do the phonetic items in the NMET affect teachers and students in phonetic teaching? And in which aspects? 3) What are the positive backwash and negative backwash?The results show that the phonetic items in the NMET (Shaanxi) exert powerful backwash on high school English phonetic teaching in both positive and negative ways. The positive backwash is that words pronunciation is indeed stressed frequently by the teachers, so that their students gain accurate words pronunciation, which is beneficial for students’memory of written words. The negative backwash is that teachers and students pay little attention to phonetic teaching because of the small proportion of the phonetic items that take in the NMET. As a result teachers in general have a tendency of teaching for the sake of tests and students have a tendency of learning for the sake of tests, which is particularly obvious in grade3of Chinese high schools. Therefore, the phonetic teaching content, strategies and classroom activities, etc, are very much restrained. It leads to an undesirable consequence that the high school students practice their pronunciation in a nearly deaf and dump world and that students’pronunciation proficiency can hardly reach new curriculum standards set for high school phonetic teaching.Based on the above results, the author of this paper discusses some possible approaches of improving and reforming this question type. Meanwhile, some practical suggestions for English teachers, school administrators and relevant authorities are proposed to improve high school phonetic teaching.