A Study On The Scale Of English Sociolinguistic Competence For Chinese University Students

There is a history of almost 60 years for the study of language proficiency scales(LPSs). Researches abroad on LPSs are sophisticated while those in China mainly introduce procedures and methods of LPSs or just simply discuss their merits and demerits. Obviously, there is a shortage of researches on how to develop a LPS. In addition, those studies of social language competence only focus on the description and developing aims without a combination with LPSs. At present, China Standards of English is under construction by Ministry of Education. This thesis aims to study how to develop an English sociolinguistic competence scale by taking Chinese university students as target group.This research is based on Bachman’s communicative language ability theory. Two questions are studied with the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. 1)What are the dimensions of sociolinguistic competence scale for Chinese university students ? 2) What are the levels of sociolinguistic competence scale for Chinese university students ? Two main steps are taken to delve into these two questions:1) The collection and editing of descriptors 2)The classification and scaling of descriptors. In the first place, 126 descriptors are collected by rewriting or translating those materials including curriculum standards,syllabus and teaching goals all over the world. Secondly, 101 of them are left after modification according to the editing principles with the help of experts. The classification,which is proved by the experts ’ consistency test, is based on the communicative language competence theory. Finally, the scaling was completed by data analysis of the questionnaire results. 30 students from 3 universities in Wuhan, Changsha and Yiyang help with this survey. And SPSS and Rasch model were applied during the data analysis.In this way, we have found that 1) There are four main dimensions in the English sociolinguistic competence scale for Chinese university students. They are sensitiveness of dialect or variety,sensitiveness of registers,sensitiveness of naturalness and comprehensive ability of the cultural references and figures of speech. 2)There are five levels from A to E to represent five developing stages of soicolinguistic competence. Moreover, the results also show that the collection and editing of descriptors are the basis of building the English sociolinguisitc competence scale for Chinese university students. So it is important to ensure the universality, representativeness and authority of descriptors’ sources. In addition, descriptors should be definite, clear, brief, independent and positive. Classification and scaling also play a very noticeable role in the construction of this scale. Thus, the classification should be based on the substantial theories and the scaling should be supported by qualitative and quantitative studies to guarantee the validity of this scale. It is hoped that the construction of sociolinguistic competence scale will give a clear description of sociolinguisitc competence to arouse learners’ interest by giving goals for different stages and suggestions for teaching.