An Analysis Of The Usefulness Of The Interpretation Section Of The Advanced-Level English Interpretation Accreditation Examination Based On The Communicative Language Testing Theory

To evaluate a test, a six-element model of "test usefulness" is proposed by Bachman and Palmer (1996,18), which includes reliability, validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact, and practicality. Language testing theories have experienced many stages and the communicative language testing theory came to take a leading position. The object of language testing theory is test the communicative language ability, which, based on Bachman’s theory (1990,84), contains three components, that is, language competence, strategic competence and psychophysiological mechanisms.With the further development of globalization, China has a wide range of communication, cooperation and consultation with foreign countries in economic, social, cultural and other fields. Interpretation, as a bridge of communication, plays a very important role. As a result many interpreting exams appear, among them is the SIA (Shanghai Interpretation Accreditation, and in the thesis, if there is no specific explanation, the SIA test will stand for the Interpretation Section of the Advanced-Level English Interpretation Accreditation Examination), who has the longest history of18years and contributes a lot to the field of interpreting testing. After nearly two decades’development, there is a necessity to re-evaluate this test, analyzing its advantages and shortcomings and coming up with some improvement suggestions. This is exactly the point of this thesis.Interpretation test is one kind of language tests and interpretation ability is a kind of communicative language ability. Therefore, the authentic test materials of the SIA test from2004～2010are chosen as corpus and the evaluation principle of usefulness is utilized to analyze them. Among the six dimensions of the principle of usefulness, its reliability is not very high, due to the inconsistency of word amount and difficulty of test; its construct validity is high; authenticity has room to improve, such as the selection of material, the testing environment and testing process; interactiveness is good; the test plays an active impact on interpreting teaching and learning and its practicality is good. At last, some weak points of the test and suggestions for improvement are given.