Investigative Researches On The Current Situation Of Achievement Test In Senior High School

Teaching and testing are partners interrelated and influenced between eachother.English test plays an indispensable role in the high school, especially theAchievement Test, which is used to measure Students’ development of skills andknowledge during a certain period, while the testing pose some backwash effect on theteaching in high school. A high-quality test cannot only exert positive effects onteaching, but also promote and improve the English teaching.The thesis studied and investigated the situation of English testing inXiangzhouNo.1senior high school, attempting to find out the existing problems, analyze thecauses and then put forward some improvementproposals. The study aimed to make thetesting serve the teaching better as an effectivemeans to examine and evaluate theteaching quality.The thesis, which was based on the elementary theory of the English testing, triesto analyze the English papers of the achievement tests, including the mid-termand finalterm and some monthly test papers, to identify the problems on the four pointsadvocated by Bachman&Palmer ofreliability, validity, authenticity and backwasheffects. Then, the thesis resorted to the approach of interviewing teachers in order toinvestigate whether they’ve learned and applied some language testing theories.Through analyzing the statistics, following conclusions were obtained:1. The test papers investigated are mostly composed of the exercises selected froma wide range of books on the market or some English learning websites. But it’sgratifying to know, these test papers tend to be changed to some extent on the basis ofwhat they were, though the types of testing almost always follow the principle ofNMET. However, what concerns us is that students new to the high school are evenrequired to work on the NMET papers or those in the exactly same level. 2.The content validity of the city-wide examinations such as midterm and final tests israther high with the appropriate difficulty, reflecting the mastery of skills andknowledge that students are supposed to achieve.On the other hand, the test papersdesigned by teachers themselves are limited to the examination of vocabulary andgrammar.What’s more, owing to the lack of speaking test in NMET, teachers attachimportance to anything but speaking skills whether in teaching or in testing.3.The teachers lack testing theory. The teachers paid too much attention to thescores, andneglected analysis of test papersBased on the above findings, the problems were analyzed, and finally someconstructivepedagogical suggestions were given as follows:Teachers should reinforce their study of the theoretical knowledge of the language testsand build an English testing group and workout the achievement test questionsaccording to their English teaching；the content of achievement test should becloselyconnected with teaching materials attempting to increase the innovation and varietyofthe questions； the quality of the test has to be improved and the proportion of eachpartcomes to be appropriate trying to be in accordance with the requirements ofteaching syllabus; the feedbackinformation is supposed to be used properly to bring thepositive backwash of test into full play;teachers should attach more importance to theafter-test work and theperceptions of the students apart from the relevant duties beforethe test. Lastly, teachertraining should be paid much attention to raise teachers’ level intesting theoryand organizing examination questions.