Construct Validity Of Senior High School English Summary Writing

In the field of language testing,validity is always a hot issue.It is the most fundamental standard to measure the quality of a test.The definition of validity has developed through almost half a century,and it has experiences three phases: the phase of single validity,the phase of classified validity,and the phase of unified validity.At present,unitary concept of validity is generally accepted,and that means construct validity is validity.At the same time,in order to diminish the fault situation between senior high school English and college English and pursue a better connection of them,the courses of American Advanced Placement(AP)are brought in.And corresponding course examinations are also organized,the Test of English for General Academic Purpose(EGAP)in the present research is one of them.This research aims at exploring the construct validity of summary writing task in 2015 EGAP,the following four questions are put forward to achieve the aim:(1)How does the summary writing task in EGAP reflect the theory of communicative language ability? Are the four items of rating scale of summary writing reasonable?(2)To what extent do the four items of rating scale,and the four items and the total scores of summary writing correlate to each other?(3)How is the internal consistency within the summary writing task?(4)To what extent does the summary writing task correlate to the other three tasks in EGAP(academic writing,listening comprehension and reading comprehension)?Both the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted in the present research.The qualitative analysis is used to answer the research question 1.Base on the communicativeness of writing,the present research analyzes the “construct” theory(the theory of communicative language ability)that summary writing established on at first.Then,an interview of three experienced senior high school English teachers about the reasonability of the rating scale of summary writing is conducted,and content-relevant evidences are gathered through the interview.The rest three questions are answered by the quantitative analysis,in order to investigate the data collected from the 100 candidates more deeply,three correlation analyses(Pearson Product-Moment Correlation)and one exploratory factor analysis are implemented by the means of SPSS 19.0.And these analyses provide construct-relevant evidences for the construct validity of summary writing.According to the four research questions,the four major research findings of the present research are as follows:(1)Three of the four items of the rating scale of summary writing task in EGAP are the reflections of the theory of communicative language ability(“construct” theory),so that the summary writing task reflects the communicative language ability;according to the results of interview,the reasonability of rating scale of summary writing is mainly confirmed,so that verifies the construct validity of summary writing from the perspective of content-relevant evidences.(2)All these correlation coefficients range from 0.505 to 0.788,indicating that the correlations between the four items and that between four items and total score are relatively significant.(3)All the four items of summary writing can explain 69.211% of the test scores of summary writing.There is only one component's initial eigenvalue is greater than 1,that means only one component(construct)is mainly tested,and there is a good internal consistency within summary writing.(4)The correlation coefficient between summary writing and academic writing is 0.418,which reflects a decent correlation.The correlation coefficient between summary writing and listening comprehension is 0.346,and the correlation coefficient between summary writing and reading comprehension is 0.507,and the correlation coefficient between listening comprehension and reading comprehension is 0.436.That indicates an insignificant correlation between summary writing and listening comprehension,and a significant correlation between summary writing and reading comprehension.The implications of the present research are divided into the follow four aspects.(1)The rating scale of summary writing should be more specific and comprehensive to ensure the appropriateness of the test scores,and test rubric of EGAP also should be more specific and comprehensive to improve EGAP.(2)In senior high school,teachers should guide students to do some summary writing training.For example,teachers can design some paraphrase practice to make students know how to express themselves by their own words.In daily translation exercise,teachers can guide students to translate one sentence by several ways to learn how to use language flexibly,and for the poorer students teachers can teach students to find the key words in the source materials and cultivate their capacity of generalization little by little.(3)In addition,to seek for a better connection of English learning and teaching between senior high school and college,some college English knowledge should be referred in senior high school English class,and students' autonomy consciousness should be cultivated to make preparations for autonomic learning,which is of great importance in college English learning.(4)The present research is conducted from the two aspects of “construct” theory and validity evidences under the unitary concept of validity,and this can provide some references for future researches on the relevant subject.