A Content Validity Study On CET Listening Comprehension (1996-2007)

College English Test (CET) is a nation-wide large-scale standardized test as well as a criterion-related norm-referenced test, administered by the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education for over 20 years. With the issue of College English Curriculum Requirement (Trial Implementation) (2004), the innovation of the Testing Syllabuses of CET-4 and CET-6 was carried out. The major changes of listening comprehension are: the weighting is increased from 20% to 35%, Long Conversations are introduced, and Compound Dictation is adopted as an indispensable part. Since Yang Huizhong and Weir (1998) has conducted a content validity study of CET listening comprehension from 1987 to 1995, there was hardly diachronic content study on this part. This thesis studies content validity of CET listening comprehension from 1996 to 2007 in the following three aspects: the degree of correspondence between CET listening comprehension and the Teaching Syllabuses and the Testing Syllabuses; the comparison between CET listening comprehension before and after the innovation; the comparison between listening comprehension parts of CET-4 and CET-6.In light with Bachman and Palmer's framework of task characteristics, with the help of teaching and testing syllabuses, listening assessment theories and findings of relevant validity studies, this thesis puts forward a more practical framework for the content validation of listening tests, which involves the characteristics of the input, the expected response and their relationship. Based on the framework, this thesis conducts analysis of CET listening comprehension both before and after the innovation from 1996 to 2007 by examining 524 short conversations, 14 long conversations, 135 short passages, 16 passages of Compound Dictation, and 1147 corresponding question items.Through analysis, it is found that CET listening comprehension has a fairly high content validity. The major findings of the present study are as follows: 1) there is high correspondence between the characteristics of the input, expected response and their relationship of CET listening comprehension and the relevant teaching and testing syllabuses in the respects of conversation turn number, speaker's accent, topic, genre, and listening skills coverage. 2) the differences between CET listening comprehension before and after the innovation are in accordance with the innovations of the syllabuses, and the CET listening comprehension after the innovation is more difficult in the aspects of the passage length, readability, speed, the word level and complexity of sentences of expected responses. 3) CET-6 listening comprehension is more difficult than CET-4 listening comprehension in passage length, readability, genre, topic, the word level and length and complexity of sentences of expected responses.Meanwhile, there are some problems: most passages of CET-6 Short Passages and Compound Dictation after the innovation are longer than the requirements; the number of conversation turns of some long conversations in CET-4 exceeds the requirements; the text of Compound Dictation after the innovation is somewhat difficult; etc.At last, some suggestions on CET listening comprehension design and college English teaching and learning are put forward.