A Qualitative Study On English Reading Comprehension Test In Wenzhou Senior High School Entrance Examination And Building Of Knowledge Base For Test Construction

Reading is the most important approach for language learners in China to input language,and it is also the main content of language learning and classroom teaching.In language testing,reading comprehension test takes up the largest proportion,and it mainly aims to measure language learners' ability of reading comprehension.As a graduation test and an admission test for high school,the Senior High School Entrance Examination is a criterion-referenced as well as a norm-referenced test.The tests in the Senior High School Entrance Examination are generally of a high validity,which thereby becomes a benchmark for test construction.English reading comprehension test is also a model for teachers to construct reading comprehension test.Their characteristics and development trend have pointed out the direction and provided a practical basis for the construction of regular reading comprehension tests.Based on Bachman and Palmer's framework of language task characteristics and the theory of communicative testing,this paper which focuses on two perspectives,namely language input and respect responses,conducts a qualitative study on the English reading comprehension tests in Wenzhou Senior High School Entrance Examination from 2009 to 2018,exploring the characteristics and development trends of English reading comprehension texts and test questions.The research is involved in the following specific aspects: 1)characteristics of the length,genre and theme of passages,2)characteristics of language difficulty;3)characteristics of the test questions.In addition,on the basis of four types of testing reading abilities,the paper analyzes the way of writing stems which are related with understanding the details,inferring from sentences and paragraphs,guessing the unknown words in the context and obtaining the main ideas and topics,providing a basis for teachers to construct English reading comprehension test questions.According to the study,both English reading comprehension texts and test questions in Wenzhou Senior High School Entrance Examination from 2009 to 2018 presents obvious features and development trends.In terms of reading texts,most of the texts range in length from about 200 to 400 words.In recent years,the length of Text C and Text D has increased greatly and four texts vary dramatically in length.There are a great variety of texts forms,among which expository writing accounts for the largest proportion,while argumentative and practical writing take up a smaller proportion.The themes of the tests are quite rich,which are closely related with the students' life and learning practice.The texts from 2014 to 2016 are relatively difficult on the whole,but those in the recent two years are less difficult.Texts of different themes and forms have corresponding textual linguistic features,which are mainly reflected in lexical density,difficult word ratio and average sentence length.In terms of test question,there are mainly multiple-choice questions supplemented by short-answer questions,which are intended to test the students' reading ability.Various reading abilities have been measured and the difficulty of detailed reading questions has been improved.Based on the above research,this study puts forward some reflections on the construction of regular tests.In addition,it is found that the construction of test questions designed to measure students' different reading abilities follows specific patterns.Moreover,the study summarizes the methods of writing different types of stems,building a knowledge base that assists teachers in test construction.