Research On New HSK Level 6 Test Questions

The new Chinese Proficiency Test(hereafter referred to as “new HSK”)was introduced out of an effort to better facilitate the globalization of mandarin in the new era and it has made major adjustments in terms of examination level and test structure.Additional adjustments were also made to the test-related characters,words and grammar.The purpose of this paper is to examine the consistency between the new HSK test and the newly adjusted HSK syllabus and provide reference for the future improvements of both the syllabus and its relating tests.This paper statistically analyzes the use of characters,words and language points in the new HSK Level 6 test and the new HSK Level 6 syllabus and conducts corresponding quantitative research and comparative analysis.On this basis,suggestions for the design of the test questions and the improvement of the syllabus are put forward in this paper.There are four parts to this paper.The first part introduces the purpose,significance,methods of the research and the existing researches.Through careful examination on the current researches,it is found that the researches on characters,words and language points in the new HSK Level 6 test and the new HSK Level 6 syllabus are not detailed,comprehensive and in-depth,and more quantitative researches are still needed.The second part covers the extraction and the measurement research of characters,words and language points in the new HSK Level 6 syllabus and paves way for the following research in the third part of this thesis.In the third part are the extraction and the measurement research of characters,words and language points in ten sets of new HSK Level 6 test questions,whose results are then used in comparison to that of the new HSK Level 6 syllabus.In terms of characters,what the research examines includes the high-frequency characters,the unrequired characters and the untested characters set forth in the syllabus;in terms of words,it includes the words which appear no less than ten times,the unrequired words and the untested words set forth in the syllabus;in terms of language points,it includes the total number of the examined language points and the frequency of each language point.The overall statistical analysis on these three elements and the close description of their distributions in those ten sets of test questions indicate that there is a distinct discrepancy between the new HSK Level 6 test question and its corresponding syllabus.Building on the researches in the former parts of this thesis,the fourth part analyses the existing questions found in those new HSK Level 6 test questions as well as the new HSK Level 6 syllabus and offers a targeted,two-pronged approach to improve the test design along with the syllabus.