A Study On The Scale Of EIC For Chinese College Students

At present, there has been an increasingly large number of studies about English illocutionary competence(EIC) at home and abroad, but there are just few studies about relevant testing, and so far there has been no relatively authoritative EIC scale.Without a clear and specific reference or standard, it is inconvenient for English textbook compilers and teachersto cultivate and develop students’ EIC of certain level and thus difficult for the students to learn in a scientific and systematic mode, which makes the researchparticularly urgent. Therefore, under the background of building China Standards of English,the study on EIC and scales is combined together in this thesis with the Chinese college students as the object in hopes of exploring how to construct the EIC scale for Chinese college students.This thesis studies Chinese college students’ EIC mainly on the basis of Bachman’s Communicative Language Ability(CLA) model with the combination of the qualitative and the quantitative approaches and it deals with the following two questions:(1) What are the dimensions of the EIC scale for Chinese college students?(2) What are the levels of EIC scale for Chinese college students?As for these two questions, we study specifically from the following aspects: to begin with, 166 descriptors related to the EIC for Chinese college students are collected from domestic and foreign language proficiency scales, curriculum standards, teaching or test syllabuses, English textbooks and some other materials. Considering that statements of the descriptors are in various forms and detailed to different degrees, the author uses the “Can-Do” statements referring to previous editing principles of descriptors by means of deleting, unpacking, packing, translating and so on, and finally 92 qualified descriptors are polished as a result. Sequentially, the edited descriptors are divided into relative dimensions according to the functional classifications of illocutionary competence in Bachman’s CLA model, and the reliability of the classifications are later validated through the inter-raters’ and the intra-rater’s consistency. In the last place, the edited descriptors are scaled into five levels according to their preliminary levels and writer’s experience. In addition, 30 professional college teachers are invited to do a questionnaire respectively, and the Muti-Facets Rasch model is used to analyze the 26 actual received feedbacks to further determine the final levels of the descriptors.This study has two major findings:(1) the EIC for Chinese college students can be described according to functional classifications of Bachman’s CLA model, i.e., ideational, manipulative, heuristic and imaginative functions and their numbers are 19, 32, 19, 22 respectively;(2) descriptors of each dimension in the EIC for Chinese college students can be divided into low, intermediate and advanced levels except the imaginative function with only intermediate and advanced levels, which shows the descriptors are reasonably collected and distributed. The whole study indicates that the collection and editing of the descriptors are the basic steps to construct the EIC scale for Chinese college students, and that the extensiveness, the representativeness and the authoritativeness of descriptors must be assured. The descriptors should be definite, clear, brief, independent and positive. The classifications and scaling of the descriptors are the key steps to make sure of the validation with solid theoretical basis on the former, the qualitative and quantitative data support on the latter. The significance of this study lies in the explorationof the rules and methods of collecting and editing“Can-Do” descriptorsin the Chinese college students’ EIC scale. It is hoped that it can provide some references for the conceptual construction, research methods of EIC, English teaching and learning and so on.