The Factor Analysis Of BEC Preliminary's Construct Validity

Business English Certificate is jointly organized by England and China. UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate) is in charge of assigning topics, scoring and awarding certificates while the Chinese Ministry of Education is responsible for registration, printing and organization of the exam. In 2002 BEC was reformed to Advanced and Preliminary which is suitable for vocational students.With its inter-activeness and authenticity, the communicative testing approach whose stems and items supply context of situation based on tasks commonly regarded as the proper method that can measure students'language abilities and it is also derived from communicative teaching undergoing the previous three stages. The testees are required to solve problems in reality, which is in accordance with the principle of BEC.Language ability, a typical mental power, usually can not be observed. Originally construct is a psychology definition that covers all the human behaviors not directly measured, such as anxiety, success motivation, intelligence, attitude and comprehension. Different from other validities, construct validity not only considers the external test score but also the profound proposition backup. The correlation coefficient determining the same language ability among items will be also high if the construct validity is high. That indicates they have potential capacity and common traits to assort into one factor independent of others. If the testing outcome is identical with construct hypothesis, we can also ascertain high construct validity.The papers mentioned BEC before basically discuss backwash and problem-solving skills and lack scientific data analyses. This thesis investigates whether the BEC test issued by UCLES aiming at vocational students can reflect the construct expected by testers. Although vocational education has its own curriculum standards and course outline to cultivate talents of professions, it urgently needs united testing system just like high school and college entrance examinations. Having drawn on the experience of BEC, my school has already established interior oral computer-based testing system. Vocational educators should make every effort to popularize BEC to be a uniform achievement test around the whole country to improve students'language on the spot.