A Contrastive Study On The Difficulty Of TEM4 And CET-6 Listening Comprehension Tests

As is known to all, Test for English Majors (TEM) and College English Test (CET) are two overwhelming influential tests for college students in China. As listening comprehension is considered one of the most important parts in both tests, its difficulty has been a great concern of the test designers. The present study aims to contrast the difficulty of two listening comprehension tests of TEM4 and CET-6 and find out which one is more difficult, whether the two tests are similar in terms of testing English listening comprehension ability, and which one requires a higher level of communicative language ability.The theoretical background in the present study is Bachman's framework of Communicative Language Ability (CLA) and Test Method Facets (TMF), which is viewed as not only a useful tool to develop and use tests appropriately, but also a useful instrument to contrast language tests. The former is the ability we wish to measure and the latter is the means by which we observe and measure these abilities. Based on the framework of CLA and TMF, the author adopts one research mode that is suitable for the present study.Research instruments in the present study are two newly-published authentic listening test papers of TEM4 and CET-6 as well as one questionnaire.120 English-major students are chosen as the sample subjects, who are required to take two different listening comprehension tests one after another within a certain period of time. After that, they are expected to complete a questionnaire survey. Then the data are collected and analyzed by the author.It is shown that as far as item type is concerned, Conversations in TEM4 is the easiest part and Passages in CET-6 is the most difficult; CET-6 is more difficult than TME4 because of such factors as speech rate, vocabulary and question preview, and CET-6 requires relatively higher listening comprehension ability; but TEM4 is more reliable than CET-6; students depends on question preview, which is believed to cause troubles taking the CET-6 listening sub-tests. Since question preview does not accord with authentic communications, the author suggests that the stems printed in TEM4 should be removed away so that the test takers have no chance to guess without listening to the record, which will bring about positive backwash effects on teaching and learning of listening. The result of the research indicates that the present study is of both theoretical value and practical significance for English teaching and learning, listening testing, as well as language testing research; the research mode in the present study basically reflects the research procedures and approaches in the field and thus it is believed to be beneficial for making future studies in language testing.