An Analysis Of Error Scores Of Multiple-choice For The Validity Of English Reading Comprehension Tests In Senior High School

Nowadays, multiple-choice reading comprehension, as an increasingly prevalent type oftesting, is occupying a large proportion in the domestic and foreign varieties of languagetests. Especially in the stage of Chinese senior high school English teaching, multiple-choicereading comprehension is attracting large amounts of attention by scholars all over theEnglish testing field, not only in college entrance examination but also in ordinaryhigh-school English tests. As an important kind of testing to measure English learners’language ability, multiple-choice reading comprehension drives more and more experts,scholars and English lovers to be concerned about it and perform various and profoundresearches on it. Although its advantages received high recognition from those experts andscholars, such as convenient operation, standard and organized form, and the objectiveevaluation, the hidden drawbacks of this type of question cannot be ignored. It fails to get ridof guessing, easy-to-cheat, difficulty of designing questions and so on. All of those factorscause those experts to think that the concept of error scores deeply. At present, no experts orscholars can analyze the proportion of error scores in the tests and the influence it has on thevalidity of testing painstakingly and scientifically. The study of error scores in this item typeis few and far between. The present research aims to investigate and analyze the effect oferror scores of English multiple-choice reading comprehension tests on the validity of testingin senior high school. Special concentration is put on the proportion of error scores inmultiple-choice reading comprehension tests in senior high school, the relationship betweenerror scores and English learners’ language ability, and in what ways and to what degree errorscores can influence the validity of English tests.The quantitative method was carried out among53Senior Two students studying in aprovincial key school. The participants have solid English foundation which is beneficial toguarantee the reliability and efficiency of experiment and data. Two tests were designed asinstruments. Each includes the same reading materials and language points, but the differencelies in the response format of each text. The second test contains translation (from Chineseinto English and from English into Chinese), error correction, and gap filling. After theexperiment, Statistic Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data.Through an overall analysis of the data, the conclusions are listed as follows. First of all,a proportion of error score, to some extent, appears in the English multiple-choice readingcomprehension tests, which indicates that the subjects’ scores fail to reflect their real level ofEnglish ability. Secondly, after analyzing the data of the proportion of error scores, theresearcher find out that the proportion of error scores is in inverse correlation to learners’English ability. Finally, it is suggested that, to some extent, error scores produce a negative effect on the validity of testing.As the findings show, we put forward some suggestions，hoping to give some help andrevelation for English education.