| Intensive reading is an important course for undergraduate English-major students.Test for Intensive Reading Course(TIRC)is an important method to examine students' learning effects.Examining the validity of the teacher-designed TIRC would help teachers know if the test meets the requirements of the basic specifications of the teaching syllabus.It can also help to see whether the course can cultivate the comprehensive abilities of students and meet the requirements of an English-major sophomore.Under these circumstances,the following research questions are put forward:1.How valid is the teacher-designed test for intensive reading course(TIRC)?Considering content validity particularly,to what extent does the test meet the requirements of the specifications of the teaching syllabus?2.If the validity is not high enough,in what way can it be improved?On the basis of Bachman's task characteristic framework and related theories of content validity,this paper made an analysis of the questionnaires,teachers'interviews and the test papers of three universities,thus investigating the validity,especially the content validity of the teacher-designed test for intensive reading course(TIRC).The results of the study show that the teacher-designed TIRC on the whole has good content relevance,but content coverage is not big enough.The inclusion of task types is not comprehensive.As for each part of the TIRC,content validity of vocabulary and grammar is low:good content coverage;bad ratio between testing points of vocabulary and grammar;little and incomplete coverage of testing points of grammar.With regard to reading comprehension,content validity is not good:although the difficulty of articles is rational,the appearance of new words is suitable,genre and themes are sound and the distribution of testing points is reasonable,reading speed is far slow for students and testing of reading skills is not complete.Cloze has a good validity since the themes and genres of passages are suitable,design of options is reasonable,and cloze has relatively comprehensive testing points.Translation also has good content validity:it has good content coverage and comprehensive testing points.Writing in TIRC has a relatively good content validity because except for lack of interactivity in writing task,the content of writing is suitable and the testing methods and requirements are reasonable.On the whole,the validity of the teacher-designed TIRC is not reasonable enough.At the end of this paper,some suggestions are put forward for the improvement of validity of teacher-designed TIRC.It is argued that there should be a comprehensive testing of vocabulary and grammar,cloze,reading,translation and writing.The distribution of task types should be more reasonable:more emphasis should be put on cloze,translation and writing.The test should focus more on the understanding and application of the language instead of rote of textbook materials.Articles should be more authentic,original,enlightening,suitably long but also a little challenging.A variety of task types and forms should be utilized and distribution of testing points should be more comprehensive and reasonable.This paper also presented implications for both English-major teachers and students,pointing out that teachers should improve at test design and students should treat the test seriously and thus know their weakness and try to improve their English competency and proficiency.Limitations of the present study are listed at the end of the thesis,acknowledging that the investigation is focused on the content aspect of validity due to limited time and energy.Also,the choice of sample test papers is not representative enough and the questionnaire is of limited size.Recommendations for future researches are also proposed.It is suggested that a more thorough analysis of validity should be done and the choice of sample should be more representative.In addition,more attention should be paid to data collection,and new research methods can be employed in future studies. |
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