A Study On Content Validity Of Listening Comprehension Section In Graduation English Test For Senior Middle School Students

Due to the reform of national on the systems of examination and enrollment, more attention will be focused on the graduation test for senior middle school students. It is essential to study its test criteria and effectiveness. As a main subject in the foreign languages education for high school students, English has become a must in the proficiency test for high school students. Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards(Experiment) was promulgated by the Ministry of education in 2003, which had made detailed provisions for the textbook writing, teaching, testing, and evaluation and so on.This study mainly discusses content validity study on listening section in the graduation test for senior middle school students from curriculum standards perspective. After reviewing the recent studies, based on the teaching goals in Curriculum Standards, the author tries to find the situation of content validity study on listening section in the graduation test for senior middle school students and put forward the corresponding suggestions.As for the methods of the study, it mainly contains method of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Specifically it can be described as follows: the author reviews the studies on the language testing validity, which lays the theoretical foundation for this thesis. Contrast to the requirements in the Curriculum Standards, the author analyzes the content of the three test papers. Using a variety of scales and formulas to analyze the statistical data, at the same time, the author gives comment and suggestions to improve problems presented on the papers.The investigation results show that the test structure of the present English listening test papers is relatively complete. The topics tested covered more than 50% of those that should be tested in the curriculum standards. The listening skill were also comprehensively involved. Basically they covered all article forms, but there is something missed in genre, such as speech, broadcast, TV program and so on. What’s more, the readability of the whole tests is a little bit easy. On the whole, it was consistent with the design principles of language testing and mostly in line with the requirements in the Curriculum Standards for high school students. It reached the purpose of the listening test, thus having the certain content validity.In order to improve the test content validity, evaluate the situation of the students accurately, objectively and fairly, for testing, the author suggests the listening material should take into consideration the familiar topic but fresh content, different genres, moderate difficulty and different score to different term. In teaching, the author puts forward the following suggestions:(1) to broaden the students’ background knowledge;(2) to use multi-mode teaching mode;(3) to improve cognitive strategy.