A Survey On Washback Effects In Reading Comprehension Of The NMET On Senior High English Teaching And Learning

In recent years, people have paid a great deal of attention to the issue of "washback", especially the influence of language tests on teaching and learning. Washback can be positive and negative according to its nature, which refers to the influence of language testing exerts on teaching and learning. A lot of foreign researchers have done theoretical and empirical studies on wash back, especially on that of high-stakes tests. While in China, researches on washback are comparatively fewer in the language testing field. But most of them are concerned with College English Test, whereas, there is little attention paid to the washback of National Matriculation English Test, let alone washback Effects in Reading Comprehension of the NMET on Senior High English Teaching and Learning. As the most large-scale and influential test, the NMET has far-reaching effects on Foreign language teaching in China.Alderson & Wall’s washback Hypotheses, Hughes’basic model and Bachman &Palmer’s scope of impact applied to this thesis is to figure out how and in what aspects does washback Effects in Reading Comprehension of the NMET affect senior high English teaching and learning on the basis of an empirical study. Data are collected from totally 20 senior high English teachers and 640 senior three students in two high schools of Chaoyang and Dalian, Liaoning Province with questionnaire and interview in order to investigate the difference of washback between big city Dalian and small city Chaoyang.The results showed that Reading Comprehension part of the NMET (Liaoning) influenced English teaching and learning of senior high school from positive aspects and negative aspects. The positive points show as:At first, it could promote students and teachers to complete the teaching task. Secondly, it could arouse teachers’ enthusiasm to teach and students’motivation to learn. Last but not least, it could broaden the students’ thoughts, improve the students to have abilities of solving practical problems and enlarge their knowledge sides. On the contrary, the negative side was that the question types were too simple for teachers and students to summarize the laws to solve the questions in the examination. What’s more, a phenomenon exists in teachers and students of Senior Grade Three, which is that teachers’teaching and students’learn only for testing. Students’learning is for getting good scores and teachers’teaching is not for the development of the students’ ability. What’s more, according to the survey, the big city Dalian have more positive washback than the small city Chaoyang.