A Study Of The Content Validity Of The Cloze Tests In NMET (1987-2012)

This thesis mainly studies the content validity of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012). As a comprehensive testing item in English testing, cloze test can cultivate and test the students’comprehensive abilities in using English. The cloze test focuses on the creativity of the language, the comprehensiveness of linguistic performance and the actual communicative competence. This kind of tests pays attention to not only the validity of the language forms, but also the students’competences of analysis and transfer the information. Meanwhile, the college entrance examination is the most influential test which has the standard reference, so the research in the cloze tests of NMET is very necessary.This research, based on the test validity theory and the corpus-approach, analyzes the content validity of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012) by using the methods of quantitative and qualitative. It mainly discusses three questions:1.What are the prominent characteristics of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012)? 2. To what degree are the information level of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012) valid? 3. How is the representativeness of the test-points of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012)? The research studies the content validity of the cloze tests in the aspects of topic, genre, TTR and Readability and test contents, in addition, it also studies the representativeness of the cloze tests by using the corpus methods of searching the frequencies of the test-points.The result of the study indicates that:1. the topics of the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012) are mainly the personal experience, the genres are mostly the narration, the reading amount is suitable for students; 2. the cloze tests of NMET (1987-2012) mainly test verbs and nouns, and from the testing content and testing syllable they mainly focus on the test of the paragraph and discourse level; 3. according to the analysis of the frequencies of the test-points in the common corpus, we found that the frequencies of most test-points are high, the representativeness of them is high, but there still exists some test-points’distracters with no interference.Because the research only studies the content validity of the cloze tests of NMET in the aspect of the test content which may lack of the studies in the aspect of the conditions in answering the questions, it couldn’t verify the validity of the cloze tests of NMET roundly, so it has some limitations certainly.