Backwash Effect Of The Reform Of English Tests In The National College Entrance Examination On English Teaching And Learning

English has gradually been paid more and more attention in China since the beginning of the policy of Reform and Open, and more and more Chinese are joining the English-learning army. Meanwhile, in the field of education English, as one of the essential foreign languages which students in the primary and secondary period have to grasp, is drawing the further attention. Students in this learning phase are required to attend different types of English tests. In the Senior High School Entrance Examination(SHSEE) and the National College Entrance Examination(NCEE), English tests are the important evaluation tools to directly detect whether the relevant requirements of the curriculum standards and the quality of education in the middle school English teaching are realized or not. Then, the National College Entrance Examination is the most important evaluation tool in this phase. These years “too much craze for English learning” is becoming the important topic focused in the whole society. Therefore,since 2013 the Department of the National Education has begun to carry out a series of reforms on the items in the English tests in the NCEE: a new type of question which asks the students to pick 5correct choices from 7 options given after one passage appears in the reading comprehension and in the “correction of passage”, there is not correction that every mistake is asked to picked out and modified in one-to-one sentence any more and the students are required to correct the passage from the whole content instead of one-to-one sentence in2013. In 2014, there is a clear change on the test items in the NCEE:“grammar gap filling” question takes place of the traditional “single choice” question that has lasted for over ten years, which affects the thought and understanding on the test items in the NCEE of the teachers and students to some extent.In Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Number One Test Paper of the NCEE is adopted and the changes of the test items in the NCEE are bound to have influence on the English teaching and learning. In the thesis, the author does a detailed analysis and then introduces an important concept: the “backwash effect”. It is named“impact” in the field of education; however, it is called “backwash effect” or “washback effect” in the field of language testing. It is very essential to do the research on the effect of the tests on the teaching and learning. In this thesis based on the theories and changes of the test items in the NCEE the author adopts the experimental survey to further explore the relevant backwash effects of the reform of the English tests on English teaching and learning.In this thesis the author adopts the questionnaires and interviews to do a survey on the Grade-two students and their English teachers in the High School Affiliated to Inner Mongolia Normal University aiming at investigating the current situation of the English teaching and learning and the backwash effect on the English teaching and learning in the senior high school. In this thesis it also concludes the opinions and proposals of teachers and students on the English teaching and learning in the senior high school, which finally work out the effective ways of promoting the positive backwash effects and avoiding the negative ones in order to improve the reaction ability of the teachers and students to react the reform of English tests; put forward the feasible suggestions for the senior high school English teachers to correctly handle the relationships between the reform of English tests and the English teaching and learning; and offer some references for the design of the test items in the NCEE.