Study On Content Validity Of Reading Comprehension Of Eess In Shaanxi

From the perspective of Chinese students, they need to join a great many examinations from primary school until university campus and among which English exams take up the significant part. The English exams in the Entrance Examination for Senior school, which are familiar by many students and English teachers, is a significant examination only second to college entrance examination. Besides, reading test plays a vital role in the English exams of Entrance Examinations for Senior School(hereafter referred as EESS). The test quality of English exams of EESS has attracted more and more attention due to its importance and significance. When referring to test quality, the validity is the foremost factor and the test quality of a testing paper relies on its validity to some extent. Over the past years, the researches concerning validity are numerous but the research about validity study of Reading compression in EESS is extremely rare.Above all, this paper will take the reading parts of five sets of English papers in Shaanxi EESS(2011-2015) as the example to evaluate the validity. This thesis aims to explore 1) the content validity of Reading compression in Shaanxi EESS 2) whether English teachers and students are satisfied with the reading part in EESS. There is some necessary material need to prepare before studying: the testing instruction of EESS in Shaanxi province(the latest version, 2015 version), English curriculum standard of senior Middle school and the valid validation framework(According to some famous version of experts). During the research process, the author combines the reading parts of five English papers with the related reference, and employs both quantitative and qualitative method to study and then analyze test papers condition objectively.Furthermore, the author figures out the validity of testing paper and points out some flaws.The detailed research procedures as follows: To start with, the improved validationframework divided into five dimensions by the author: rubric requirements, variables of reading-test input, characteristics of the expected response and input and response, and the author makes some analysis and evaluation of reading test of EESS according to these dimensions. Meanwhile, the author compares the objective data from analysis with the related reference materials in details(i.e. curriculum standard etc). Finally, the author employs two reliable questionnaires to obtain the comments of English teachers and students for reading test of EESS and processes these data scientifically.After the complex analysis and study, some conclusions can be reached as following:First, the content validity of reading test in Shaanxi EESS is relatively high on the whole.The objective data show that the testing content is highly consistent with the formulations in the curriculum standard and testing instruction. Second, the author still finds some drawbacks in the reading comprehension part of English exams of Shaanxi EESS through studying. For example, the distribution of reading skills and of passage genre is not satisfying; the reading speed of whole testing is in the low level and so forth.Third, both English teachers and students are satisfied with the reading comprehension part of English exams of Shaanxi EESS although there still some questions from the perspective of questionnaires.