A Corpus-based Study On Content Validity Of Reading Comprehension In NMET(Hunan)

This thesis "A Corpus-Based Study on Content Validity of Reading Comprehension in NMET (Hunan)" tends to probe into the content validity of reading comprehension tests of NMET (Hunan) from2011to2013by quantitative and qualitative methods, which are parts of the test paper corpus.Based on the task characteristics framework and the progressive validity theory, the author mainly finds out the characteristics and analyzes the content validity of reading comprehension parts in NMET (Hunan) by closely observing National English Curriculum Standards for Senior Schools (NECS) and the testing syllabus. According to the above assessment framework, the author explores the content validity from the following aspects, including the topic, the genre, text length, reading speed, readability. As for the progressive validity theory, the author analyzes the reading parts from the perspective of the content and the objective which effectively avoid overlapping and crossing of the evaluation indexes and at the same time improve the above assessment framework.The main results of the present study show that the reading comprehension tests have a relatively high content validity and the samples in this study are representative, for they cover the requirements of both NECS and the testing syllabus. The findings are summarized as follows:papers have a suitable control of the difficulty of reading passages and the reading amount is suitable for students; reading tests keep stable for the test composition which meets well the requirements of reading comprehension passages stipulated in NECS and the testing syllabus; almost all the three papers attach more significance to textual understanding of partial information for medium-level students; reading materials are novel, ideological, authentic and educational,, which are related to the students’ social lives closely.However, there still exist some defects in analyzing the reading tests. The distribution of topics and genres is imbalanced; reading speed just reaches the lower level for learners; the difficulty of reading passages should be well arrayed; reading tests should cover more integrated information and be suitable for testing all students’ language ability in the future tests.