Analysis Of The Reliability And Validity Of The PGG Reading Comprehension In The Context Of Communicative Language Testing Theory

Language test is a crucial part of foreign language teaching.It is also an efficient approach to measure the language competence of students and therefore provides valuable information for language teaching.PGG(Test for German majors-band 4),as a national standardized test of German proficiency administered to German majors at the end of their foundation stage,has been enjoying increasing influence in recent years.Owing to its scientific approach,consistent marking,rigorous administration and comparable scores,PGG is now a well-established large-scale standardized test,and is widely recognized in China.Communicative language ability includes,according to Bachman in his Fundamental Considerations of Language Testing,not only grammatical competence such as vocabulary and grammatical rules,but also the pragmatic competence which consists of both sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence.In this sense,the communicative language use is the interaction between language users,the situational context and the text.Therefore,communicative language tests must also test the ability of pragmatic language use of the test takers.For German majors,the ability to read efficiently is of vital importance.Therefore,this paper tries to look into the reading comprehension part of PGG from year 2010 to 2013,and tries to conduct both quantitative and qualitative analysis by analyzing interactively between the students' reading scores and the contents of reading comprehension.The analysis focuses on the answering of the following questions:how objective,reliable and valid is the PGG-Reading Comprehension with regards to the determination of the communicative language ability of the students?To answer this question,Bachman's "Test Characteristics Model" will be introduced as theoretical basis.He divides characteristics of the test methods into five domains:settings,rubrics,characteristics of input and expected response,and the relationship between input and response.Analysis of the objectivity focuses on the settings and the rubrics.Through analyzing not only the external environments of the tests,such as test places and time limits but also the internal factors,such as the test structure and evaluation process,the PGG reading comprehension can be proved as objective.The reliability of the PGG reading comprehension is analyzed with the help of the computer program SPSS calculation.The Cronbach's a of the test contents of reading comprehension in the four years are all over 0.9,thus rendering the PGG reading comprehension to meet the requirements of standard language test.The analysis of the validity is the essential part of this paper.The analysis of the characteristics of input and expected response is conducted in the light of the test task characteristic model derived from the Bachman and Palmer's model.By analyzing the model required elements,such as length,readability of the texts and pragmatic characteristics,such as genre,theme of the texts,the validity of the PGG reading part by way of content analysis is carried out through comparison with the teaching syllabus,test syllabus and test specifications.The scores,also known as the response of the test takers,are also analyzed with the help of SPSS.In this way,the interactive analysis between the content of the reading comprehension and the scores of the students is also conducted.Finally,the author humbly hopes that this thesis can provide some recommendations and suggestions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives for further improvement in the field of German language teaching and testing researches.