A Comparative Study On The English Reading Part Of College Entrance Examination: Task Features Testing Perspective

Reading abilities are important in English abilities, and they are also key points in language testing. Chongqing ran its own national college entrance examination(NEMT) since 2004. However, in 2016, the NEMT in Chongqing will be reformed according to the official document, and the paper which similar to national volume 2 will be used instead of the Chongqing volume. Since different testing materials tend to test different abilities, so the requirement of the National volume 2 may be different from the Chongqing paper. And developing students’ reading abilities will be an important task, so the differences of the reading comprehension between the Chongqing test paper and the national volume 2 will be a core concern.Based on Bachman& Palmer’s test theory, this thesis has made a new testing frame. Using the frame, this thesis has a comparison on the reading part of the two NEMT’s English papers from 2011 to 2015 for finding the differences in its input features and expected answers. This thesis can help teachers and students handle different reading materials and develop students’ reading abilities.The study shows that the two test papers cover almost all types of topic and genre, while exact amounts are different.Secondly, Chongqing paper is easier than the National one in difficulty, which includes the new words, length and readability of the essay. The text of Chongqing volume is longer while the readability is higher, and the new words are fewer. Articles of similar degree of difficulty are used frequently in the Chongqing paper.At last, the reading skills in the relevant documents are almost tested. However, the number of detail skills is not the same in the two types of test paper. Both papers tend to test skills of finding detail information and make judgment and reasoning, but very the numbers of the other four ones.This thesis is not very profound because of the author’s inexperience. And some classifying rules of topic or genre are obscure, so when classifying, the author would not be objective enough. The two points above are all needed to be improved and strengthened.