An Investigation Into The Test-taking Process Of Keywords Composition And Picture Composition In New HSK-5

New HSK-5 is regarded as the watershed which distinguishes intermediate and advanced Chinese proficiency. According to statistics, among the global averages of the three sections including listening, reading and writing, that of writing section is the lowest, i.e. 59.4, missing the pass line. Obviously, there is a lot of room for the candidates to improve their writing abilities, so it is necessary to investigate candidates’ performance in this test. Different from the traditional research angle which focuses on the error analysis, this study tries to explore candidates’ test-taking process involving discourse organizational process, strategy use and the relation between candidates’ notes/written products and writing process.The studies took the two writing tasks of New HSK, i.e. keywords composition and picture composition as the research material. Six overseas students in Master’s program from Chongqing University in China participated in this study. The test-taking process revealed by a concurrent think-aloud protocol and immediate retrospective interviews were investigated and analyzed. The findings were:The discourse organizational processes in the two writing tests were different; a large number of strategies involving writing strategies and test-wiseness strategies were employed in both the two writing tests; the note and the written product served as an important clue for the process study.Based on the results, some suggestions about Chinese-writing instruction and Chinese as the second language writing test were put forward. At last, the limits of this study and the direction of future research were discussed.