A Study Of English Testing Practice In Huanggang Middle Schools

Language testing,as one of the basic activities of language teaching,has a great importance in school teaching.However,there are still little influential research on the current situation of language testing practice for realistic reasons.Most middle school English teachers are practitioners of language testing,so a survey was made about their current practice,weakness in this process were found and improvements were found to be necessary.Through questionnaire about four main dimensions in language testing practice,this paper seeks to analyze five problems: 1.How much do middle school English teachers know about the basic concepts or theory of language testing? 2.How do they design testing papers and what are the resources of their testing items? 3.How do they implement language testing? 4.H ow do they make use of the test results? 5.What do they need in the training of language testing?This research invited teachers from representative schools in districts of Huanggang,including Macheng,Xishui,Huangzhou district,Tuanfeng and Luotian.In part four,frequency and proportion are presented in order to draw out conclusions about questions mentioned above: middle school English teachers known about basic concepts in daily testing,but when it comes to some professional theory,they have little knowledge.In the designing part of testing,few teachers will design testing papers by themselves and few of them have this chance.Most of them make use of papers from other schools or city-wide tests.When analyzing the scores,the majority of teachers think that the scores are a reflection of students' true level.When it comes to data analysis,they apply no other method but average score.Almost all participants need to be trained in the area of language testing.According to data analysis,suggestions could be offered for institutions and individual teachers from four main dimensions.Firstly,for normal universities,students are suppose to take courses about language testing.Secondly,for middle schools,teams formed by experienced teachers could give training about basic theories and tests' construction skills to new teachers.Rules of implementation and specifications of marking should be set.Thirdly,for individual teachers,they could be trained on testing theories and construction,and follow schools' flow of implementation and marking.They are also supposed to learn how to analysize or explain scores.