| Washback refers to the influence of testing on teaching and learning. The College English Test (abbreviated as CET) is regarded as a large-scale standardized criterion-related norm-referenced test. It is sponsored by the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education and has been in operation for over two decades, aiming to accurately measure college students'ability to use English in a well-rounded way. Since CET has taken significant measures, mainly including test content, test format, scoring formula and score reporting, especially for the innovation of translation is so great. In the innovated College English Test Band 4/6 emerges a new test content-translation, which is located in the last part of the whole paper. This part has a total of five incomplete sentences, every sentence consists of about 15-30 words, part of sentence was given in English, require students to complete the sentences by translating into English the Chinese given in brackets according to the whole sentence meaning. It takes a proportion of 5 percent. The test designers hope to check students'ability of using correct vocabularies and grammatical structure and expressing thinking according to English usage. Since testing has been playing such a significant role in teaching and learning and testing translation is considered as an important means to evaluate and improve the teaching of translation. Many researchers have conducted relevant researches on translation teaching and learning, and put forward lots of proposals and methods to improve them, but few empirical studies have been conducted on the washback effects of CET-4 translation. So it is necessary and worthwhile to conduct empirical studies.In this thesis, based on Alderson and Wall's 15 Washback Hypotheses and Gu Xiangdong's basic model of CET, adopting the combination of theory and practice, quantitative and qualitative methods, the author employed three kinds of instruments (questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations). The subjects in this study are 60 college students and 300 college English teachers from three colleges. According to the findings of this empirical study, CET-4 translation has exerted both positive and negative washback on teaching and learning attitude, objective, content, methods, material selection and motivation. On the whole, negative washback effects have outweighed the positive ones. Moreover the author has also put forward some factors inducing negative effects of CET-4 translation, and proposed some suggestions to enhance the positive effect:(1) Adopting appropriate methods in translation teaching (2) Adjusting Teaching Aims of Translation (3) Innovating of testing content, testing format and scoring report.
|
PDF Full Text Request