Designing And Assessing Of FRT Paper For English Major

Reading, as one of the four language skills, is the most direct and efficient way that students acquire language knowledge and cultivate their language competence. In particular, in the domestic land, students seldom have the chance of acquiring information through listening or speaking with other persons. As a result, reading passages becomes the main source of information. Therefore, the reading competence is an important indicator of someone’s language competence so that in every type of English test, the question items concerning reading competence will take up a large portion, sometimes even above40%.The final reading test (FRT for short in the following) is an achievement test which is supposed to check students’reading competence. It is always designed by colleges themselves. The time for FRT is at the end of one semester. Test takers are usually the first-year or the second-year English majors.The main testing purpose of FRT is to check students’mastery of what they have learnt in the semester, including the understanding of vocabulary appearing in textbook and after-class exercises and the application of reading skills acquired in classroom lessons. Thus, in FRT, the question items concerning vocabulary and reading comprehension are two necessary parts. Besides, through FRT teachers can detect the deficiency in their teaching process so as to improve the teaching efficiency.In the daily teaching activities, the writer found that many students perform differently in FRT and the reading part of certain nationwide English proficiency test. Therefore, in this thesis, the writer put forward the view that FRT should not only check the students’mastery of what they have learnt in one semester, but also it should reflect students’reading competence and function as a predictor of students’performance in the reading part of the future proficiency test. On the basis of this view and with the help of various testing theories, the writer developed a specification for FRT as the research result. Meanwhile, a sample test paper under this specification is also designed. The content of sample test papers bases on the specific condition of the first-year English major in Yucai College where the writer is working. Besides, the quality of the specification and the sample test paper will be evaluated in Chapter four.What’s more, in this thesis, there are two experiments. Experiment one is the model test of the designed sample test paper. After the model test, the test results will be analyzed so that the indexes of difficulty and discrimination will be obtained. Meanwhile, in order to research test takers’washback better, the writer designed one questionnaire to all the students participating in the experiment one. The experiment two is the comparison of the results of two tests. Firstly, the sample test paper will be divided into two parallel parts according to "split-half method". Then, these two parts will be tested in different time. The coefficient of reliability can be calculated through the comparison of the results of two tests.