The Washforward Effects In NMET

In view of the importance and authority of college entrance examination in China, how to work out a high-quality NMET (National Matriculation English Test) paper, so that it can be used to assess students' true language ability in a better and fairer way, naturally becomes the common goal of all. Although the design of NMET paper is a huge project which is associated with various factors, ultimately it is established through the NMET developers' interpretation of exam syllabus and test instructions, application of the principles of language testing, and the implementation of all kinds of demonstrations and calculations. Therefore, the quality of NMET developers is a key factor in determining the quality of NMET paper. Especially, under the background that in 2016,26 provinces (31 in total) across the whole country will adopt the uniform national tests for college entrance examination, this problem has become particularly prominent. The possible influences from the participants on the test are defined by Bailey (1996:263) as "washforward effects" in "a basic model of washback" in his article Working for Washback:a Review of the Washback Concept in Language Testing. The participants he explains in his model cover researchers, teachers, curriculum designers, teaching, learning, new materials and so on. But the present study only focuses on the most salient and direct ones:namely, the NMET developers and senior high school English teachers. Different conceptions or views of these participants'in NMET, resulting from different backgrounds, teaching experiences, composition of knowledge and individual characteristics, are bound to bring positive or negative effects to the design and quality of the NMET paper.The present paper attempts to answer two research questions:firstly, what is washforward effect? What are its main manifestations? And secondly, what conceptions or views of the developers'in NMET will lead to positive or negative washforward effects? How can we promote positive effects? The subjects of the thesis are mainly made up of two categories:the NMET developers in Shaanxi Province as well as senior high school English teachers from three key schools in Xi'an. What's more, in the process of carrying out the present thesis, the author has adopted research methods of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis using questionnaire and interview as two main research instruments. Questionnaires can provide large amounts of objective information and interview data can serve as supplementary information at the same time. Finally, conclusions will be drawn by analyzing and discussing the data collected from the questionnaires and interviews.Through the results and discussion of the data, several conclusions can be reached: (1) As for the assessment of one's reading ability, most of the NMET developers' and senior high school English teachers' conceptions or views are in consistent with the principles of language testing, which brings about positive washforward effects in NMET. (2) Regarding the testing of one's writing ability, more than half of the NMET developers and 36 percent of senior high school English teachers agree that it is better to divide the writing part into two writing tasks, thus improving its validity and ensuring more fairness in NMET. (3) As for the testing of oral English proficiency in NMET, more than half of the NMET developers and 87 percent of senior high school English teachers think it very necessary to include this item type in testing the test-takers' overall language ability, which, on the whole, is also good for the sound development of the NMET paper. (4) Regarding the appropriacy of including the sentence translation in NMET, most of the subjects hold that it is inappropriate to include it in NMET because of the low controllability of its answers. Thus, to some extent, some negative washforward effects are avoided in this aspect.(5)As for the comparison of the validity between the multiple-choice and the open cloze, nearly half of the NMET developers favor the open cloze with its higher validity and testing of the test-takers' comprehensive ability. But there are still a large number of subjects who just cannot give up advantages of the multiple-choice, advocate a combination of both in NMET, which may also lead to negative washforward effects.The research conclusions show that participants of the NMET design do exert different degrees of influences on the quality of the NMET paper from different angles. In particular, given the fact that different test developers'conceptions or views often vary, their influences on the NMET design can be positive or negative. It is hoped that through the analysis and discussions of the research results, some valuable suggestions can be offered to better promote the scientific design of NMET paper.