An Analysis Of NMET Papers2010and2011a New Curriculum Reform Perspective

It is known that the basic education in China has changed a lot since the new English Curriculum standards were carried out in2003. English teaching in middle schools is guided by The New English Curriculum Standards and series of teaching elements are undergoing innovations to some extent, such as textbooks, test, and the dominating teaching method. Those innovations are arousing more and more attentions around the people concerned with the basic education, like educationalists, teachers, parents, and students. Many studies have been carried out for studying the dialectic relations between New English Curriculum Standards and teaching elements. As one of the most important teaching elements, test would be influenced by the advance history of The New English Curriculum Standards to a large extent. Many educationalists and school teachers had already concentrated on how The New English Curriculum Standards influences test.Lots of studies have shown that language testing has functions as direction and backwash towards English teaching. In China, NMET (National Matriculation English Test) which possesses high validity and reliability is the most important test in the period of basic education. There is no doubt that the reform of NMET has proposed some new requirements or some new tasks towards NCR (New Curriculum Reform) in middle schools. On the contrary, NCR has also raised some new tasks for the reform of NMET. The Chinese government put forward The National Education Reform and Development of Long-term Planning Programs (2010-2020) in2010, and in the same year, NCR has been carried out all over the country. Based on the theoretical study of language testing, the study will analyze all the thirty-eight NMET papers in2010and2011under the perspective of new curriculum reform, aiming to find out what does the recent NMET test, does it fit to the spirits of NCR, are there any defects existing in the testing papers and how can we remedy the defects. A thorough analysis shows that the NMET papers in2010and2011mainly test students’comprehensive language ability and language communicative competence, and at the same time try to cultivate students’ cross-cultural awareness, emotional attitude and values. On the one hand the feature of stability has been reflected through the test; on the other hand, slight innovations have been made from2010to2011. Testing students’comprehensive language ability and cross-cultural awareness in reality will be the tendency in the future. Those reforms will influence English teaching in middle schools as well. English teaching in middle schools must fit to the innovation of NCR and NMET for final target is to cultivate students’interest for learning and study ability for a whole life.