Research Into The Authenticity Of Listening Comprehension In CET-4(2013-2014)

Since the advent of communicative language testing in the 1970s,authenticity has been a concern in language testing and has often been argued that if we wish to predict a candidate’s ability to communicate in the real world,then texts and tasks should be as similar to the real world as possible.Many researchers have claimed that authenticity has a strong effect on candidates’test performance,but they do not provide supporting evidence for this and the achievement is not very satisfying for most of them are non-empirical(Widdowson,1970;Breen 1985;Van Lier 1996;Rost and Ross 1991;Bachmann&Palmer,1996).In China,authenticity has gained more and more attention.Many researchers have introduced the foreign theories into China and applied the principle of authenticity into different tests(李筱菊,1997;李清华,2001;邹申,2001;孔文,2003;马莉,2003;黄大勇,2004;辜向东,2012;徐启龙,2012).The research and debate around the definition of authenticity is going on.Until 1990s,Bachman and Palmer held that authenticity refers to the degree of the correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language use domain.This definition is widely accepted and used.Based on Bachman and Palmer’s definition, the present study is expected to confirm the task features of the current listening sub-test of CET-4. Under the guidance of the framework of task characteristics, the listening components of six authentic CET-4 papers will undergo content analysis from five aspects including setting, input, rubrics, expected response and the relationship between input and the expected response in order to check its correspondence degree with those of target language use tasks in the hope of ascertaining to what extent authenticity has been taken into consideration. Moreover, it will provide some tentative suggestions for improving the authenticity of CET-4 listening sub-test, and contribute to the test development, validation, teaching and learning practices. This dissertation recommends that more attention should be paid to test-takers’ opinions and more specific exploration and empirical research should be done.