The Study Of Designing A Test Specification For Computerized Oral English Proficiency Test Of Hunan University

In order to go with the international standard in education, the Institute of Lang uage Assessment of Hunan University accepts an assignment from Academic Affair s Office to develop a computerized English proficiency test which tailors to college st udents in Hunan University. With the requirement of educational reform and college st udents'urgent need of improving their speaking ability, oral tests have become an indi spensable part of the whole English proficiency test, therefore how to measure student s'oral proficiency in line with the principle of fairness and equitability has been put o n the agenda. The study intends to design the specification for the oral component bas ed on the requirement of the syllabus of the Computer-based College English Proficie ncy Test. Test specification is also regarded as a strong evidence to prove the validity o f test results and will be regarded as gauge to design test items. And this study devel oped a sample oral test according to the designed specification, did an experime nt test and analyzed its validity and found out some revision points for the des igned specification after a series of careful study of qualitative and quantitative analysis.The study comes up with three research questions:(1) To what extent is th e format and content of this newly-developed specification reasonable? (2) To w hat extent is the experiment test derived from the specification valid in terms o f construct validity and face validity? (3) How can the format and content of t he specification be modified for the purpose of improving the validity, reliabilit v?The present study is divided into two parts using both qualitative and quan titative research methods. In the first part, the study designed the specification f or the oral test by means of referencing the syllabus of the Computer-based Co liege English Proficiency Test developed by the research group of the Institute of Language Assessment of Hunan University. The second part examines constru ct validity by means of doing correlation analysis and factor analysis to the res ults of experiment test derived from the specification. Furthermore face validity will also be conducted in accordance with feedback gathered from test takers. A 11 the data analysis is calculated by SPSS 19.0.As is shown in the study, the designed specification has a clear construct with complete contents. There is high correlation between each part and test around 0.6 to0.8 which suggests that the test mainly measures students'overall oral ability. What's more, the fact that only one factor is extracted in factor analysis further testifies that the test construct validity underlying the specification is in normal range. The results of the questionnaire showed that the majority of students approve of the test but at the same time put forward deficiencies to be modified. Combined the results of questionnaire with validity study, the present study comes up with some suggestions on amendment. Hopefully revised test specification will better serve tests design and the present study can provide the reference to similar researches concerning specification design.