Comparative Studies Of Content Validity On2004-2007National Matriculation English Test Papers In Shaanxi Province

In China, National Matriculation Test (NMT) is a large-scale and high-risky examination. While NMET is a key and important part of NMT, it has so far been the largest norm-referenced standardized proficiency English test in china. Purchasing after Beijing, Shanghai, other provinces have carried out middle school new curriculum reform and autonomous designs of NMT paper have taken place among those provinces. Until2007, there being altogether18provinces have designed their own NMT papers and19sets of English test papers in our country. This phenomenon caught great attention from the education circle that began to doubt the consistency and the quality of the papers. It is known that all researches related to NMET mainly focus content validity, reliability, authenticity, item analysis and other qualitative studies, sometimes some quantitative studies done are on item difficulty, and discrimination validity.Shaanxi province has designed its own NEMT papers since2006. Consequently, some changes have undergone in testing items. This paper is based on the NMET papers from2004to2007in Shaanxi province, specific and relevant data information collected and vertical comparison and analysis are conducted by using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The conclusions are reached as follows:1. Listening comprehension is officially canceled after Shaanxi province designed its own NMET papers, which affects the whole validity of the paper. Although speech sound and conversion are added into, they cannot be in place of the listening compression at all and its validity is lower as well.2. In terms of the content validity, this paper does the comparison between the four years’ papers and Testing Syllabus and the Teaching Syllabus and Specifications. Evidence has been found to be good supporter for the generally good content validity for their wide coverage of testing points. However,2006-2007papers comparatively are lower in content validity. According to the Testing Syllabus and Senior Middle School English Curriculum requests, the NMET should put the emphasis on the integrative language ability, while it cannot test the students’ integrative competence after2006.It is hoped that this paper can make contributions to make up for the NMET studies and shed some lights on further designing of NMET of Shaanxi province. However, considering this paper just covers four years’ papers, the results may not be comprehensive and integrated. Hence, a lot of relative researches are needed to be done in the future in order to improve its design and highlight specialty of Shaanxi province.