| Testing should serve the needs of teaching. Language testing provides goals for language teaching, and it monitors, for both teachers and learners, success in reaching those goals. The power of examination over what takes place in the classroom has been widely reported by many educationalists. The belief that assessment can leverage educational change has often led to top-down educational reform strategies in order to bring about changes in teaching and learning by bringing about changes in testing. This educational phenomenon, commonly called "washback" in applied linguistics, refers to the influence of testing on teaching and learning. Since the open policy, exchange in politics, economy and culture between China and other countries has been strengthening. More and more people have realized written English only is not enough for people to communicate in English in a real world. They also need spoken English. Yet with the negative washback effect of CET-4/6, CE teachers and learners have actually paid much attention to reading, some attention to writing, listening and translating but little attention to speaking. In order to change the CE teaching/learning situation, DCNCET constructed and administered a new standardized examination called CET Spoken English Test (CET-SET). CET-SET, as an optional component of CET, is an instrument used to measure the abilities of Chinese college students to communicate in spoken English. The present study attempts to explore the possible washback of CET-SET since its administration in 1999 and how it works, as far as examiner/non-examiner teachers and qualified/unqualified learners are concerned. It explores the possible washback elicited by CET-SET on the average non-English-majored undergraduates through a survey. This dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the general research background and the significance of the study. Chapter 2 deals with some theories related to oral testing, which are the theoretical basis for the present researcher to examine the washback effect of CET–SET, including the three components of oral ability—micro-linguistic skills, routine skills, and improvisation skills, and two approaches to testing speaking—structualist approach and communicative approach. Chapter 3 makes a survey study on CET-SET including the significance, validity and reliability study of CET-SET. There have been both pedagogical and practical reasons for the implementation of CET-SET in China. The advent of communicative approach to language teaching in the 1980s has inevitably exerted its great influence on language testing. On the other hand, a large number of foreign-oriented personnel are obviously in great demand in the course of China's modernization. The validity of CET-SET is examined in terms of its syllabus in this paper. The reliability of CET-SET is examined by examining the intra-rater consistency, inter-rater consistency and inter-center consistency. Only when a test is valid and reliable can it produce positive washback.Following the review of CET-SET, Chapter 4 presents detailed description of the study with an account of the design, instruments and the procedures of the study. The study is designed to be a mixture of survey and descriptive research in the light of its objective and quality. It attempts to examine whether washback exists in CET-SET and to what extent it affects teachers and students with regard to their attitudes and perceptions of CET-SET, and consequently their teaching and learning strategies, of which the most basic level—students of the "participants" and learning of the "products" will be focused on. Data, both quantitative and qualitative, are collected through questionnaires from more than 300 students at Jilin University and about 60 teachers from Jilin University and several other universities. Subsequently, the data are analyzed by means of descriptive and experimental methods.Chapter 5 focuses on the results and discussion of this research guided by the design. Elaborated data de... |
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