A Study Of The Wasbback Effects Of TEM4 On English Teaching And Learning

For the past ten years, washback studies have developed rapidly with many of them having been done to deepen people's understanding of this area so as to promote the reform and innovation in language testing and language teaching. Whereas these studies mainly focused on large-scale and high-stakes language tests, the washback of TEM4, as a large-scale and high-stakes test, has been somewhat neglected in the Chinese context.This study chose teachers and students in a newly-built local university as participants to explore the washback effects of TEM4 on English teaching and learning. The research aims to explore what washback effects TEM4 has on teaching and learning, the nature of washback effects and the causes of washback effects. The questionnaire surveys, classroom observations and interviews were used to collect data from 15 teachers and 242 students in Taishan University. The data were analyzed, summarized and classified with the help of SPSS 18.0 and the coding scheme.The findings showed that TEM4 could promote teaching and learning but lead to test-taking preparation activities. TEM4 brought about stronger washback effects on teaching content than on teaching methods and it influenced different teachers in different ways. For students, TEM4 influenced sophomore students more than freshmen which indicated that the closer the students are to the time of the exam, the more washback effects could be seen. In addition, TEM4 was found to strengthen the motivation to the teaching and the learning with useful feedback on teaching outcomes and learning shortages. In the meantime, it caused pressure and anxiety to students and brought some changes in teaching and learning aims. The two main factors to cause the negative effects are the conflict between students'eagerness to pass the exam and their weak English, as well as teachers'and students'perceptions of importance of TEM4.This study concludes that TEM4 has washback effects on various aspects of English teaching and learning in the newly- built local university, including teaching content, teaching method, learning content, learning method, learning motivation and so on. In general, TEM4 has positive effects on English teaching and learning, but it also causes some negative effects. Therefore, some implications were proposed to promote positive effects, such as promoting the communication between test developers and test users, introducing self-assessment in learning and providing more detailed report on students' performance in TEM4 test.