Comprehending Longer Texts In College English Test Band 6: Construct Validation

College English Test Band-6 is a nationwide English test sponsored by the Ministry of Education and administered by the National Education Examinations Authority(NEEA)of the Ministry of Education.The purpose of College English Test Band 6(CET-6)is to objectively and accurately measure college students’ English proficiency.Since December 2013,the item types of the CET-6 have been revised: longer text comprehension replaced fast reading comprehension.This study attempts to investigate the construct validity of “longer text comprehension” in the CET-6.The specific objective of the study is to explore whether the task assesses what it is purported to measure.The research questions of the present study are as followed: Research Question 1:What is the intended construct of “longer text comprehension” of the CET-6? Research Question 2:To what extent does “longer text comprehension” of the CET-6 assess the intended construct?According to literature review and interviews with the CET-6 developers,the intended construct of “longer text comprehension” of the CET-6 consists of search reading to locate information relevant to the predetermined needs,scanning to locate specific information and skimming to understand the main ideas of a text.The present study adopted introspection to conduct construct validation of the CET-6 longer text comprehension.Twelve candidates were selected,and their thinking processes were analyzed.This study also collected the data of the 2018 CET-6 pilot test and analyzed correlation coefficients.The result shows that the difficulty level of longer text comprehension items is 0.63,which is satisfactory.The correlation coefficients of longer text comprehension with total scores,careful reading and gap-filling are 0.678,0.211,0.242,respectively,indicating that performance on the task correlates reasonably well with the overall language proficiency,but the construct it measures differs from those measured by the other two tasks in the reading section.Research findings suggest that CET-6 longer text comprehension can basically test its intended construct.Search reading and scanning are frequently used in the task-completion process while skimming is often adopted by test-takers in text-processing but is rarely used in completing test items.It is suggested that new tasks could be added to assess the skimming skill.It is also suggested that revisions be made to the CET-6 test specifications.As a skill frequently used by candidates in introspection,search reading should be more explicitly described as a construct of longer text comprehension in CET-6 specifications.