Validity Study On Each Item Of National Matriculation English Tests

Testing has a close relationship with teaching. Testing is a direct approach to valueteaching methods, and it is also a measurement of students’ learning results. Besides thesefunctions, testing also plays a role as a selection method. National Matriculation Test is atypical selection test.Students and their parents care about the quality of the test papers most. The two mostimportant factors in test quality are test reliability and test validity. Unlike the test of othersubjects, English test is a language test. It means that the purpose of language test iswhether it can measure testees’ real language competence instead of just measuringabstract language knowledge.National Matriculation English Test is combined with psychometric-structuralist testand communicative language test. For psychometric-structuralist test, it often uses discretetest items to test the forms and structures of language. The grammar and vocabulary itemin NMET is a typical discrete item which emphasizes on testing the single language point.The communicative language test is based on Bachman’s communicative language abilityframework, which not only focuses on language competence, but also on strategiccompetence, etc. NMET starts to value students’ integrated language utilizing ability tosome extent.Quantitative and qualitative research methods are used in this thesis. Collected data isanalyzed by using SPSS FOR WINDOWS13.0. This thesis emphasizes on recent threeyears (2009-2011) National Matriculation English Tests in Jilin Province. The authoranalyzes construct validity of the entire test and the content validity of each item (grammarand vocabulary, cloze, reading comprehension, dialogue matching, error correction,writing).This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part elaborates the research backgroundand research significance; literature review will be done in the second part, and in this partrelated definitions and theories will be introduced; part three and part four are the majorpart of this thesis, in these two parts, basic thoughts, research procedures will be clarified,and collected data will be analyzed and discussed, including general information ofNational Matriculation English Tests from2009to2011, test content validity and constructvalidity; the last part concludes the main findings of this research, and providesimplications as well. This thesis only focuses on students’ scores and the test content. Other effects onscores, such as raters’ reliability, candidates’ psychological factors, and external influencesshould be further analyzed.