The Washback Effect Of PRETCO Writing On The College English Writing Teaching And Learning In Higher Vocational Colleges

Being an aspect of the quality of the impact of a language test, washback is usual referredto the influence of testing on teaching and learning. There are two kinds of washback that calledpositive washback and negative washback, about which a lot of researchers have been conductedabroad from theory to practice. As a foreign language teacher, it is necessary to have a fullunderstanding of testing washback, to maximize the positive effect of the testing on teaching andlearning, to reduce the negative impact.Language testing is important to language teaching. Meanwhile, the teaching can determinethe basic ingredients of testing, otherwise it will be invalid. It is the close relationship betweenlanguage testing and teaching that make so many educators, linguists and testers get interested inthe washback of testing, In the process of language teaching, the teachers must put their entireattention on the four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among thefour skills, listening and reading skills are the main access to language input, while speaking andwriting skills are the main access to language output. Between the later two, writing skill isconsidered to be the most difficult to obtain, and skillful writing must be trained by formalinstruction and long-term practice.This thesis is about the washback effect of PRETCO writing upon the college Englishwriting teaching in higher vocational colleges in Shandong, choosing Shandong PracticalEnglish Test for Vocational Colleges as the main test. This thesis will choose300non-Englishfreshmen,150non-English sophomores, and30teachers from Shandong Institute of Commerceand Technology, Shandong Yingcai College and Jinan Vocational College as main researchingobjects. The retrieving situation of questionnaires is good: questionnaires done by teachers areretrieved totally,296pieces done by freshmen are retrieved and147of sophomores are retrieved.According to the data that collected, it has been found that the main weak points that thestudents face in the writing learning process are the lack of interesting and motivation, theunsolidified linguistic knowledge. The main problems that the teachers face in their teachingprocess are their concernment with the instructional technology and the evaluation of students’writing, and the problems that appear in writing test of PRETCO are involved in the writingtopic, writing requirements and the writing presenting forms. In respect of the washback of writing test of PRETCO, it has been proved that this test plays washback in the students’learning and teachers’ teaching. Both the positive and negative washback exist, but the positiveare far more than the negative.Based on the research of present situation and washback of vocational college Englishwriting learning and teaching, further propose on how to make good use of the positivewashback of writing test of PRETCO, to prevent the negative washback of writing test ofPRETCO, to seek to have modest contribution on the development of higher vocational Englishlearning, teaching and testing. In the area of teaching, main recommendations in this thesis areproposed, such as the combination of writing and reading, the combination of listeningcomprehension, the combination of writing and speaking, strengthening the grammar teaching.In terms of the PRETCO test, this thesis hope the topic of the writing test of PRETCO can relateto the content of college life, the topic requirement should be flexible, the forms of the writingtest should be diversified. According to the findings of the research, the author proposedimplications as well as pointed out the limitations of this research and suggestions for the futurestudy.