Building A Common Reference Scale Of Gist Summarizing Ability For NMEE:an Empirical Study

This thesis makes an empirical study of a common reference scale of gist summarizing ability for National Matriculation English Examination (NMEE). Gist summarizing ability is an important component of listening and reading comprehending test in NMEE. It is to check candidates’ comprehensive ability, therefore it is a difficult point. The studies of gist summarizing ability at home and abroad have focused on the aspect of exam-oriented skills. The quantitative studies of gist summarizing ability, especially from the aspect of building a common reference scale, are relatively inadequate. At present, the problems of "Can Do" statements of language ability in Curriculum Standard and Examination Outline are vague definition, overlapped classification and unclear rate. Therefore, the establishment of a unified common reference scale is necessary.This thesis based on the theory of Cognitive Processing Ability of Discourse Information and the theory of Communicative Language Ability makes study of the following two questions:(1) What elements will the "Can Do" statements of gist summarizing ability be included?(2) What dimensions are involved in the description of gist summarizing ability? The instrument of this thesis is all national matriculation English examination papers from1987to2012. It is used to calculate the number of the test questions checking candidate’s gist summarizing ability of listening and reading comprehending part. Meanwhile, based on the parameters that affect language comprehension ability, it has abstracted the "Can Do" statements about gist summarizing ability from test questions. Questionnaires are used in this thesis to collect data. And based on the collected data of Questionnaire one, Inter-rater Consistency Test has been conducted through SPSS to check whether the described statements are reasonable or not and to find out the construction of "Can Do" statements of gist summarizing ability. And the data collected from Questionnaire two are used for Factor Analysis. But before making Factor Analysis, KMO and Bartlett’s Test has been made, which is to check whether the collected data are suitable for making Factor Analysis. Under the premise of the test result showing that the collected data are suitable for making Factor Analysis, this thesis has conducted Factors Analysis to obtain the dimensions gist summarizing ability can be described from.This study finds that:(1) the elements that the "Can Do" statements of gist summarizing ability consist of are topic or subject of a text and its checked content;(2) the number of the dimensions that the "Can Do" statements of gist summarizing ability are involved is eight. They are text main idea, text topic or subject, text title, writing purpose of a text, paragraph main idea, paragraph topic or subject, paragraph title and writing purpose of a paragraph. From the results of this thesis, we can get a better understanding of the construction of the "Can Do" statements of gist summarizing ability in the listening and reading part, which contributes to the ability training in our routine teaching activities. In view of the limitation of data collection, this thesis is still insufficient in the aspect of relevant validity. Therefore, the following study of GSA scale can be conducted from this aspect.