A Study On The Internal Validity Of The Cloze Tests Of NMET(National Paper ?,2013-2017)

In order to further confirm the validity and the quality and of cloze tests of NMET(National paper II),this study takes 5 years' cloze tests of the National paper II as materials,employing statistical analysis,questionnaire survey as well as empirical study to explore the internal validity of cloze tests of NMET(National Paper II).Internal validity mainly includes the content validity and construct validity,and the testing point validity is also studied in this paper.Based on the empirical analysis,this paper puts forward some practical suggestions for English teaching,English testing and future research.The purpose of this study is to analyze the internal validity of the cloze tests of National paper II from 2013 to 2017.Meanwhile,the following three questions are proposed:(1)How is the content validity of the cloze tests of NMET(National Paper II)from 2013 to 2017 in terms of the characteristics of the materials?(2)How is the testing point validity of the cloze tests of NMET(National Paper II)from 2013 to 2017?(3)How is the construct validity of the cloze tests of NMET(National Paper II)from 2013 to 2017?This paper first analyzed the content validity of the cloze from 2013 to 2017 from the characteristics of genre,topic,length and readability.Furthermore,the results of content validity are compared with the requirements of the College Entrance English Exam Syllabus and New Curriculum Standards to determine whether the results meet the requirements.The result reveals that the cloze tests from 2013 to 2017 conform to the requirements of the College Entrance English Exam Syllabus and the New Curriculum Standards,especially in widely distribute topics and the moderate length.According to the testing point validity put forward by Li Xiaoju(1997),this paper then analyzed National college entrance English cloze exam(National Paper II)from 2013 to 2017 from testing point level and focus factor by using text analysis and quantitative method.The result shows that the cloze tests from 2013 to 2017 have high point validity.All of the five years' cloze prefer to test sentence and discourse level instead of word level in terms of testing point level,i.e.,it is to test the use of language knowledge in context.The results also show that the cloze tests from 2013 to 2017 have high point validity in terms of the focus factors in that they prefer to test meaning part instead of grammar.The cloze tests enable the test takers have the ability to infer the information behind the whole passage rather than just to master some grammars and collocation points.At last,with the 45 senior high school students at Grade 3 in Zhang Xian No.1 School in Gan Su province being participants,this paper made a comparison of students' thinking process and the performance to analyze the construct validity of the cloze tests from 2013 to 2017 by using questionnaire.According to Psychometrics project analysis,each group should account for 27% of the total proportion.Therefore,the author divided the test takers into three groups according to the average score: for students whose score is between 0-6 belong to the low score group,for those who are in 7-13 are in the middle score group,for those who got 14-20 are in the high score group.The result demonstrated that students in each level all prefer to skim the cloze passage to get the main idea of the passage.Meanwhile,for students in the low score group,they do not show great interests in adopting strategies except strategy 9 because of the low English ability.For students in the middle score group,with the growing English ability,they are likely to use vocabulary strategies and strategy 12 of sentence part to fill in the blanks.For those who are in the high score group,because of the high English level,they have great tendency to use various strategies in the four parts to deal with the answers.Therefore,the cloze tests in these five years can measure the students' English proficiency at different stages,so they have high construct validity.Through the analysis,we find that cloze tests from 2013 to 2017 tend to test students' sentence and context level and can test students' abilities in different levels,which means that it can test students' comprehensive abilities.Through the analysis,we can also find that cloze tests tend to test students' sentence and discourse level,and test students' abilities in different levels,namely,it can test students' comprehensive ability.Based on the above analysis,the author summarized the limitations of this study and put forward some suggestions for future research.Subjectivity should be avoided as much as possible in the process of analyzing testing point level.In order to fully understand the validity of the cloze,test should fill in the analysis of several years.Construct validity of each year should be to analyze the cloze test.Teachers should choose more cloze tests and analyze the construct validity of the cloze one by one and study more different validity of cloze.