High School English Test Content Validity Based On The New Curriculum Standards

This study explores content validity of High school English achievement tests in the background of the New Curriculum Standards. After reviewing and summarizing the relevant studies home and broad and reading New Curriculum Standards, the author tries to find the current situation of English test content validity in high school under the background of the new curriculum. In the view of the existing problems, the author puts forward relevant suggestions to solve them and make some comments on the investigation.Three kinds of research methods are employed in this thesis. The first one is documentary analysis. The author consults a large number of literatures about language testing theory and the author reads and analyzes them carefully. The author also reads the New Curriculum Standards carefully which provides some useful theoretical direction for the analysis of the current situation of English test content validity in high school under the background of the new curriculum. The second one is paper analysis. The author collets English testing paper from the four high schools in Nanjing and then analyzes the content of the four testing papers. At last the author makes some comments on the research results and gives relative suggestions to solve the existing problems. The third one is educational statistics. The author uses the method of educational statistics to sort out and analyze the data collected.This survey results show that:the four sets of test papers examine the comprehensive language ability of students well to some extent, consistent with the proposed capacity requirements of comprehensive language ability in the New Curriculum Standards. It also indicates that the achievement tests of high school English has started to change, focusing on the context of the test, and communication skills test. However, there are some disadvantages in the paper proposition because of the negative impact of examination-oriented education. For instance, there is still certain distance between the test content and the requirement in the New Curriculum Standards, and the paper design is not very professional, and test is lack of specific purpose. And the main reasons for the existence of these disadvantages are that the teachers don't get enough knowledge about English language testing theory. The negative impact of examination-oriented education is another reason.The revelation of the investigation shows that something should be done to improve those disadvantages. According to the problems of testing this thesis provides some suggestions for the improvement, including reforming and improving the evaluation mechanism, strengthen the training of English teachers and optimizing the teaching staff, correctly positioning the relationship between English testing and teaching, establishing test group and establishing the English testing bank for the region.The author hopes that the suggestions mentioned above can be useful to China's high school English tests in the region and also hopes that they can bring some inspiration to the our English educators in the region to perfect the region's English teaching and testing.The limitations of this thesis lie in that the author selects the test papers only from four schools, so the range of the research is limited. And because of the limited theoretical knowledge, the author does not give overall and profound analysis of the high school English achievement tests. These are to be in the future for further research.