The Relationship Between The Scores Of College English Test And English Communicative Competence

College English Test(CET),administrated by the ministry of education, has thelargest number of participants in Chinese colleges. It aims to inspect theimplementation of the syllabus and measure the comprehensive English abilities ofcollege students and serves the college English teaching. It has drawn too muchattention ever since its emergence and caused wide social impact. CET has comethrough several reforms which do not stop people from all walks of life criticizing it.One of the complaint is that some students getting high scores in CET can notcommunicate effectively in practice. CET’s position is being shakened. TOEFL,administrated by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has been an important test forstudents wishing for further study in English-speaking countries and recognised as aneffective test for a long time, especially after the reform of TOEFL in2005. It canreflect the practical needs for life and study in English speaking countries. However,the judgment on CET and TOEFL need empirical research to confirm. This thesisaims to make sure whether the CET test can reflect the real communicativecompetence of the test takers through the empirical study.According to the theory of Communicative Language Testing, if a test cannotreflect the testing aim, the validity of the test is low. As for CET, the situation that thehigh scores can not represent high competence revels its low validity. Chapelle pointsout that the correlation study can be used to test the validity. That is to say, the validityof a test can be examined with correlation study with other tests.On the basis of analysis above, some scores of CET and TOEFL iBT arecollected from the students taking part in both CET-4and TOEFL iBT. And these dataare used to do a correlation analysis in SPSS. Before the data analysis, two hypothesesare presented: there is a feebly positive correlation between CET-4and TOEFL iBT in measuring the receptive ability and in measuring the productive ability, CET-4doesnot as well as TOEFL iBT. The comparisons between the two tests are taken fromlistening, speaking, reading and writing and they are supposed to conclude the reasonsof weak correlation. At last, it can be summarized that the high scores of CET can notrepresent high communicative competence. CET is still an examination-oriented testfor language knowledge. CET can take the mode of TOEFL as an example and get itsnew direction in the guide of Communicative Language Testing(CLT).