A Comparative Study Of ILEC And LEC From The Perspective Of Authenticity

The notion of authenticity has been put forward since the advent of communicativelanguage testing. Authenticity is an important concept in the field of language testing.Bachman and Palmer (1996) see it as one of six components of test usefulness. It is alsopivotal to Douglas’（2000）consideration of tests for specific purpose in that it is one ofthe two features which distinguishes such tests from general purpose tests of language.According to Douglas（2000）, authenticity is the reflection of validity of ESP testing,thus it is more demanding of authenticity. In recent year various ESP tests are rising tomeet the needs of English in different area, among which legal English test is verypopular in many countries, for example, ILEC (International Legal English Certificate)was set in Britain in2006and LEC (Legal English Certification) was set in China in2008. However, quite few studies have been carried out to explore the authenticity oflegal English test and there is no literature about the authenticity of LEC and thedifference between this test and another kind of legal English test ILEC. Based on thestatus quo mentioned above, this research aims to make a comparative study of ILECand LEC test in China test from the perspective of authenticity.This research adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods. The samplesinclude the sample tests from ILEC and LEC and three participants from SouthwestPolitical and Law University. The research instruments include immediatesemi-structured interview and text analysis which is based on a new checklistestablished mainly on the base of Bachman&Palmer’s framework of input.The findings from the research are drawn as follows:1) materials in the two testsare authentic in many aspects, such as language, topic, and genre. Both tests can presentdifferent context of legal English use situation. The shortcoming of ILEC is that thespeed of listening is too fast to the participants. The shortcoming of LEC is that thepassages of reading section in so limited in number, topic and genre, and the length istoo long to the test takers. Besides, the prompt of writing section is a little bit long,adding the burden of reading to the test takers.2) As for the test task, both tests adoptdirect sub-test which is advocated by “real life” approach. Being well designed, thedirect tests not only have face validity, but also interactional authenticity. Besides,non-direct test, such as multiple choices can also be authentic since it has the potentialto test the test takers’ ability. However, the large mount of multiple-choice in LEC reduces the directness of the whole test.Although this research may offer some implications to ESP test designers, there arestill a lot of limitations, such as the number of the participants is limited, the explosionin this study is not deep enough and this research itself might not be comprehensiveenough. Thus this research needs further improvement.