A Study On The Factors Influencing The Test Difficulty Of English Reading Comprehension

China Standards of English(CSE)provides a scientific assessment standard for all kinds of English tests in China.At the same time,it also puts forward new requirements for unifying the difficulty standard of English test in China and establishing a graded English test bank.Reading ability test is an important part of the English test system in China and reading comprehension is the most commonly used method to measure students' reading ability.Therefore,controlling the difficulty of reading comprehension is the key factor to ensure the quality of the test.In the past,most of the relevant researches have discussed the influence of text and question on reading comprehension test separately,but reading comprehension test is the unity of text and question,and it is obviously not comprehensive and objective to discuss the impact of one aspect only.Therefore,this paper puts both text features and question features into the factors that affect the test difficulty of reading comprehension,and further refines the text features into three dimensions: lexical difficulty,syntactic difficulty and text difficulty,and defines the question features into three dimensions: reading competence requirements,scope and directness.On this basis,an analysis framework of the factors that affect the test difficulty of reading comprehension is constructed.This study selects 56 reading comprehension passages and 210 corresponding items as research subjects in an empirical manner,and the following conclusions are drawn through the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.Firstly,at the text feature level,syntactic difficulty and text difficulty have significant influence on reading comprehension test difficulty.In terms of their correlation coefficients(syntactic difficulty r =-0.292,text difficulty r =-0.263),syntactic difficulty is the most influential factor in text feature level.Secondly,on the level of question features,reading competence requirements and directness are significantly related to the test difficulty of reading comprehension.The correlation coefficients r are-0.384(reading competence requirements)and-0.398(directness)respectively.Therefore,directness is the most influential factor on the level of question features.Thirdly,by unifying the correlation coefficients,the order of correlation between six sub-factors and reading comprehension test difficulty is directness,reading competence requirements,syntactic difficulty,text difficulty,lexical difficulty and scope.Finally,this study finds that text difficulty has a linear correlation with reading comprehension test difficulty.Through regression analysis,the prediction model of reading comprehension test difficulty(y = 1.038-0.079x)is obtained.The results show that syntax and directness,in other words,grammar and the ability of paraphrasing,should be paid enough attention in the process of teachers' teaching and students' learning.From the ranking of six sub-factors,the top two belong to question features.Therefore,the test designers should pay more attention to the change of question features when controlling reading comprehension test difficulty.In addition,the test designers can use the linear relationship model to roughly estimate the final test difficulty of reading comprehension.