Towards Content Validity Of Shanghai-based Vocational School English Proficiency Tests: Communicative Language Testing Perspective

English is a required course in secondary vocational school in Shanghai. As animportant means, Shanghai-based Vocational School English Proficiency Test hasbeen valued by Shanghai Educational Committee and all the vocational schools in thecity. It has played a positive role in testing the vocational school students’ Englishlevel and the quality of the English instruction.In this research, Liu Runqing’s three main criteria are used to test the contentvalidity: the testing content is relevant to the testing objectives; testing content iswell representative and test content is suitable for the students. The analysis of theprevious tests shows that in spite of it’s positive effects on the English teaching in thevocational schools in Shanghai, problems still exist in the content validity, such as thefocusing too much on the language knowledge, lacking oral testing items andinteraction of communication, etc..Based on the investigation and modern communicative language testing theory,guided and helped by experts of curriculum, language testing and professionals inenterprises, this research explores a more effective way to raise the content validityof the Proficiency Test. An experimental test using the new question types andanalysis have been conducted in twenty-five vocational schools. According to theresults of the analysis and with the help of the experts, a new type of the VocationalEnglish Proficiency Test with higher content validity has come into being.The new test is divided into three parts: the first part is listening (40points); thesecond is reading and writing (30points); the third is speaking (30points). Instead ofpaying too much attention to knowledge, the new type of testing focuses on thespecial needs of the language skills required in workplace with more listening,speaking and subjective expression items.Since this research is only the general study of the validity of Vocational Englishtest based on the theory of communicative language testing, to further improve thevocational English test content validity, many practical problems remain to be studiedand solved, such as: how to ensure the authenticity of language materials and communication, how to set up the testing situations to test students’ ability ofcommunicative interaction, how to integrate information technology and testingtasks to achieve a better goal and how to ensure the reliability of the oral section, etc.All of these mentioned above are what has to be focused on in the future research.