Studies On Item Writing Specifications Of CET-4 & CEt-6 Reading Tests

The National College English Test is an English teaching test administrated by the Ministry of Education, which aims at measuring Chinese college students’ comprehensive abilities of English practice as well as to supervise the implementation of College English Curriculum Requirements. Initiated in 1987, CET has become a nationwide norm referenced test, during which there has been several innovations. These innovations have deeply influenced China’s English education system and English test development. In December 2013, the CET innovated again and the reading comprehension part is innovated like this: “the item type of Skimming & Scanning was changed into the Long Passage which now belongs to the Reading in Depth”. With the development of CET, it is quite significant to study the item writing specifications of CET Reading Comprehension.Based on the reverse engineering method, this thesis has selected CET(from June 2007 to June 2014) reading comprehension part(including Skimming & Scanning, Banked Cloze, Long Passage Reading and Careful Reading) as the research corpora. Besides, this thesis has introduced some corpus softwares and calculating formula to help derive and infer the item writing specifications of CET Reading Comprehension. The results show that reverse engineering method is quite effective in inferring and deriving the item writing specifications of CET reading tests and each item type of CET reading has its own item writing specifications. Besides, this study will also provide some references and suggestions for the item writing and language teaching of CET Reading Comprehension.