A Study On The Content Validity Of English Reading Comprehension Of Business English Certificate

As the economic boom has swept China,English became an important tool for communication and foreign trade.Meanwhile,Business English,as an important branch of English,has received more and more attention.Business English Certificate(BEC)is a test for people willing to work in a business environment and is to assess test-takers' real business ability.The predecessor of BEC is Certificate in English for International Business and Trade(CEBIT)which was recognized by many countries in Europe and America.It was introduced to China in an aim to assess language ability in 1993 with the cooperation of both University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate(UCLES)and National Education Examinations Authority(NEEA).In 2002,the new version of BEC was adopted and it is still in use up to now.There are already more than one million people who have taken this new version of exam and over 15,000 employers and educational institutions accepted it as qualifications which reveal the great influence of BEC.There are three levels of BEC test: Preliminary,Vantage and Higher.Preliminary is the simplest and the Higher is the most difficult among three levels.In each level,there are four parts: listening,reading,writing and oral test.Each part accounts 25% of total points.Among all four parts,reading is considered to be really difficult and test-takers are given one hour to complete it.The testing formats of reading comprehension part are: collocation,multiple-choices,gap-fillings and corrections.The testing syllabus of each level has specified the requirements for each testing format.Normally there are five to seven parts in the reading comprehension of a paper and the testing syllabus has specified the passage length,theme and genre of each part.If the testing designing is consistent with the requirements of testing syllabus and Cambridge ESOL,then it is of high content validity and vice versa.This means the test developers must be careful when designing BEC papers and make adjustments if there is a room for improvement.What's more,Validity is a critical instrument to assess the quality of a test.Therefore it is necessary to study the validity of papers of BEC.And it is in great need to research the content validity of BEC reading comprehension of all three levels.Based on the task characteristics of Bachman and Palmer's framework and the newly devised framework,this thesis researches the content validity of BEC reading comprehension at all three levels which are Preliminary,Vantage and Higher from the data collected from 68 passages of 12 papers.There are two parts of the analysis content.The first is input including text length,reading speed,readability,passage themes and passage genres.The second part is expected response including the length of question,sequence of questions and sub-skills.The author compares the collected data with the requirements of BEC testing syllabus to see if all testing papers meet all the standards and requirements.Reading comprehension of BEC basically meets the requirements of testing syllabus and Cambridge ESOL in recent years which means reading comprehension of recent years has high content validity with appropriate passage length and themes related to economy and trade.However,there are some shortcomings.For example,at Preliminary and Higher level,the latter parts are easier.What's more,the average difficulty of same part in different papers is not balanced.For instance,as for the sequence of questions,the model changes from strong to weak and then to strong may cause anxiety and stress of test-takers and is not good for their performance.At the end of this thesis,the author offers some useful suggestions for the improvement of test designing and test candidates' Business English learning and teachers' English teaching.When designing BEC papers,test-developers should design according to the requirements of testing syllabus and Cambridge ESOL.As for high school's Business English teaching,teachers should fully make clear the targets of teaching practice and the system of teaching practice.What's more,they should give students appropriate trainings pay due attention to sub-skills of reading.